Monday, September 05, 2011

"Morning Tryst-Bar Harbor"-16x12 , oil on board by Maryanne Jacobsen

SOLD"Morning Tryst-Bar Harbor"-16x12 , oil on board by Maryanne Jacobsen

Today I decided to try a different approach to the schooner that I'd photographed in Bar Harbor Maine.



If you have been following this blog, you'll know that I've been working on limiting my palette to create a more cohesive painting.

The last time that I painted this scene, I used an analogous palette, meaning that I took colors that were adjacent to each other on the color wheel. In my last painting, I used reds, blues and greens to create an analogous color study, making the warmest color on my palette a very cool red (magenta).

Here's what it looked like:



In this new painting (above) I decided to go with a triadic color study, meaning that the colors are evenly spaced around the color wheel. I decided not to use primaries, and instead went with complimentaries, using orange, violet and viridian green, while completely omitting blues, yellows and reds from my palette.

I must confess that this was hard for me, just as the analogous study was!

I cheated a little bit and towards the end I added magenta, which is either a very warm violet or a very cool red, depending what you are thinking. I decided to put it in the purple family and thus make it legit for my study, and I must confess that the painting kind of needed that little pop of red!

I was pretty happy that I was able to get through this process.

The hardest thing for me, was to be without blue in a seascape. I had to keep adjusting the viridian and the violet in order to get my blues, and that was very challenging for me.

On the positive side, I was happy that the end result looked unified and yet still colorful!

Let me know what you think of my triadic color study.



2 comments:

Fawn McNeill Barr said...

Love your color challenges, very inspiring!

Teresa Cowley said...

Fwiw, I like them both quite a bit. Maybe I prefer the triadic a little more than the analagous. But that might change tomorrow.

I admire your work in both of these pieces.