One thing I’ve been able to do over the last two weeks is think.
And one of the things I’ve thought about is beginning color work in the Flemish technique.
The work I’ve done so far on umber layers and dead layers has been, for the most part, interesting. But some of it has also felt suspiciously like wading upstream against a current that wants to do something else.
Part of the current is the desire to work in color on something other than a portrait. Another part is to see some real detail. Yet another part is to see something finished! Anything!
With the beginning of a new week and returning health, I’ve been looking at the lesson paintings that are either ready or nearly ready for color and planning my next steps. Some interesting ideas have come to the fore during those (physically) idle moments that may make the process more streamlined in the long run.
One of them is the treatment of backgrounds.
As I write this post, three paintings that are past the three-week drying period in the dead layer. They are Contemplation, Joker and Afternoon Graze. Of the three, only one (Afternoon Graze), has a full background. The other two are tonal.
Of those two, one of the horses is going to be black and it was that realization that led me in the direction of thinking about color and backgrounds.
Someone at the Sunflower Arab Show in April commented that the dark umber backgrounds looked like wood and that the paintings had the look of being painted on wood. I thought at the time that it would be very interesting to develop a painting that way intentionally.
The thought that arose with Joker was to leave the background in the dead layer stage and only ‘color’ the horse. What if the horse was fully developed in color and the background was left alone? What would be the end result?
I can already see that the portrait of Joker could be completely finished fairly easily because of the color of the subject. It wouldn’t take much color to give the entire painting the look of full color.
Likewise, the horse in Contemplation is a fictional horse and can be any color I want him to be. That means I can build him out of the background almost as easily as what I could do with Joker. Just chose the first color and get started.
Those two may be good projects for getting back into some kind of painting rhythm, but there is a certain amount of appeal to starting with a landscape, too. A good deal of thought and anticipation has been devoted to painting the sky and land in Afternoon Graze, too.
So who knows where I’ll begin. Suffice it to say that the first three projects present some interesting and unique possibilities for beginning the color work in the Flemish technique.
©Copyright 2009 by Carrie Lewis. See original post here.
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