Tag Archives: color

Nov 13 - Open Acrylics and Defining the Color System

November 14th, 2008 | By Elin Pendleton

I’ve been asked to “explain” my Color System–Hmmmm. That can be a bit of a challenge, since it requires a minimum of three full days by Color Boot Campers to get an inkling of what it is all about. So I’ll pose the question to all of you who have been through a Color Boot Camp, and have seen the Color Flash Cards:

How would you describe the Color System to someone unfamiliar with it?

Please reply in one of two ways: 1) post a comment to the blog, so it will remain there permanently for others to see, or, 2) reply to this message and I’ll put some at the end of this message once it has gone out. I’ll really enjoy your responses, and hope you’ll do #1 and post them as comments to this blog entry on the blog site. If you reply to the email, you’ll only talk to me. I think there’s much to be offered in how you see the Color System. So can you help me out?

Now, here’s an 8 x 6 evening sky painting done with those Golden Open acrylics, using the Color System. It was a out-of-head sketch done at the very end of the workshop at the Art Expo with Suzanne next to me and Catherine across the tables. We had a great time! This one is available for $175 including shipping as a nice example of the sunset skies and also “open” acrylic handling. Paypal is fine. Fun!

I’ll be starting another large canvas over the weekend for you, and again I’m going to use those Open Acrylics. I think I will also video the process, and consider assembling the various footages I have in the digital editing room into a new DVD–called “Acrylics and Oils with the CS”… or something.

You can post a reply to my blog here.

Color System information can be found HERE.
If you need to email me directly, please click here.

©Copyright 2008 by Elin Pendleton. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit Elin Pendleton’s website.

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3 in a row, horse photo.

November 12th, 2008 | By Donna Ridgway
There’s something about this photo that catches my attention. It could be that I spent about three hours out in the horse pasture to finally catch three horses lined up like elephants marching!

I like the way their forms are repeated right down to the end. You kind of wonder what you’re looking at, then the tail on the last horse gives it all away. You can tell from that tail, these are horses.

And just for fun, here they are in living color. I go back and forth as to how I like to look at them best….Class, Bunch and Murphy, all in a row!
Donna Ridgway

©Copyright 2008 by Donna Ridgway. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit Donna Ridgway’s website.

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Oct 19 - 90% covered and a Break

October 19th, 2008 | By Elin Pendleton

Yesterday you saw the blues going in. Now the canvas is 95 percent covered. I’m still in the cool box as I paint the rocks in the foreground with the “big three” sky colors, creating the illusion of their reflected colors from the blue overhead atmosphere. Variations on those mixes creates the visual interest there. You can click on the image to get a larger verson with more details.

Although the light area at the upper left is in sunlight, I painted it completely with cool mixes to keep it back there.

At this point, I stopped to take a photo because of the warms that are (finally) appearing on the grassy area across the water and on the rocks and pine needles in the foreground. I wanted to share with you the painting at this stage with the cools in place. Compositionally, do you see how the three trunks on the left mirror the lit three trunks on the upper right? Ties the whole image together with implied lines going between them–like a bridge across the water!

As long as the painting holds up with cool box mixes, adding the warms in smaller percentages will always enhance, not destroy, the composition and color balance. As I’ll be painting so much detail in the foreground, I want you to have a resting place, separate from the horses across the water. In fact, those horses will be much less prominent than shown by the areas unpainted, because when I paint them, I’ll pick colors and values that will have them blend in–just like the “Morning Pasture” painting from September 14th’s blog entry (opens a new page).

I just love a painting at this stage–the source material and the painting are now distantly related, yet the details that will fully tell the story are not yet in place. When you paint, do you put the focal point in first? How much more can you get, if you delay that addition until the rest of the canvas is singing along? Now that my canvas has the basic colors in place, the fun begins as I make each area more interesting to you, the viewer. Eye candy!

You can see my entire blog here.

Color System information can be found HERE.

If you need to email me directly, please click here.

©Copyright 2008 by Elin Pendleton. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit Elin Pendleton’s website.

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Waxing Artistic

October 18th, 2008 | By Linda Shantz
Rubytuzday

It was rather on a whim I decided to take the most recent FASM workshop offering. Encaustics are a medium I knew little about but found intriguing. After seeing some originals in person at the FASM general meeting where the teacher for the workshop, Cora Brittan, gave us a presentation, I thought if I could manage to attend and cover my usual barn work, I would! I even had everything on the materials list, so I didn’t have to buy anything.

Simply speaking, encaustic painting is a process that uses wax. Techically what Cora taught us was mixed media, involving everything from drawing, ink, linocut printmaking and collage. I decided to keep it as simple as possible - I’m a painter, so I felt a bit out in left field! Like a good workshop participant, I did a couple of drawings the night before, so I wouldn’t spend half the day working on my drawing and not get a chance to actually play with the wax. It’s something I always encourage my own workshop participants to do, with varying degrees of success!

Poseidon

I found out, very quickly, that it would take a bit of trial and error to come up with work I was actually happy with, though I will show you what I did anyway. I used a combination of technical pen, coloured pencil and oil pastel for my drawing. The first one, which I’ve posted at the top, I went back over a second time with the wax - once I had a better idea of how it worked! The photo doesn’t show it, but I used some of my very cool Sennelier iridescent oil pastels over top of the wax as well.


At the very least, I had some fun with colour today. The last one I didn’t finish, only putting the wax over the drawing I did with the tech pen. You can see I used the same drawing again - all of the colour is from the waxes. Certainly nothing resembling the intricate designs our instructor produces! I believe I will be sticking to oils for the time being, but every now and then it’s nice to just play! I kind of felt like I was back in grade school!

©Copyright 2008 by Linda Shantz. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit Linda Shantz’s website.

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Sep 11 - Continuing the Landscape, and the Flash Cards are HERE!

September 11th, 2008 | By Elin Pendleton

Oh, my! Thank you for your response to the Color System Flash Cards! I’m prepping envelopes and Alberto will be here today to fill and send them off for you. It was wonderful to be able to offer them at a much lower price than I originally thought. I do hope that some of you will let me know what you think of them–a mini review?

Here’s the next 45 minutes on this canvas… mixing cools and dark values to fill in the “framework” of the composition, and then putting in the middle distance (mid-ground) ultramarine blue affected grasses. No details at this stage. Again, I’m just covering the canvas! Although I sometimes feel a tweaking need to slip into the warm boxes, I curtail it and instead mix up other hues that still read “cool”. Almost every mix is more than two colors, too. That grays down the overall “feel” of the painting, and if I add any warms, they’ll only be enhanced by the cooler hues.

Source material again for your enjoyment:

You can see, that although my warm boxes are completely “out of the picture” (HA… Pun!) the differences between the colors in the painting and the colors in the photograph are already diverging. This is why I absolutely love painting and the Color System, because it gives me much better choices than just those in the source material.

You can see my entire blog here.
Color System Flash Cards at this link:
http://www.elinart.com/pages/flashcards.html

©Copyright 2008 by Elin Pendleton. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit Elin Pendleton’s website.

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Sep 5 - Forgot the Swatch on the Cow

September 5th, 2008 | By Elin Pendleton

Yesterday I was so excited about the Flash Cards that I forgot to add the swatch of the cow for you to see that purple! But sometimes thing happen this way, so I can explain more fully why something works for me. And so it is. Here’s a circle from the shoulder of the cow, against a neutral gray background. Can you identify the colors? The painting is here, too, smaller, to refresh your memory.

Training the eye to “get it right” when you mix colors takes time, and a neutral gray area around one’s colors can truly assist in identifying the colors. That’s why on my taboret, both my glass acrylic and oil palettes are sitting on top of gray painted wood. With each mixing of colors, I have made my job of identifying the colors that much easier. Look at the same circle below, surrounded by white. All you see is the circle, and we miss the beautiful variations of color within the circle. The color is dominated by the value contrast, plain and simple.

Working on a high value white palette will make you change your colors to be lighter than they need to be, because of that contrast issue. And your eyes will tire quickly as they adjust constantly between the color and that high-value white. The palettes of the old masters and many seasoned painters are a patina of every color–which equates to…. you guessed it!…. GRAY. I like a clean palette, so painting the wood underneath gray solved the dilemma for me.

You can see my entire blog here.

If you need to email me directly, please click here.

©Copyright 2008 by Elin Pendleton. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit Elin Pendleton’s website.

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Sep 4 - How Now, Purple Cow? Moonlight

September 4th, 2008 | By Elin Pendleton

A purple cow doesn’t look purple when it is painted in moonlight, but it truly is. You can see that by isolating the color and putting it on a neutral gray background. (See below for the swatch from the cow’s shoulder.)

Knowing how to paint something that is white (or black, or both) during different times of day is the whole concept about the Time of Day Color System. It requires practice, and most importantly, THINKING to get great color every time.

I did this 12 x 16 inch oil painting as a demonstration piece for moonlight during the workshop in Sebastopol a week ago, and then left it in the camper when I returned. Hmmmm, I wonder how many other paintings are sitting up on a shelf to be discovered later?

I received the first color proof on the Flash Cards… they are going to look great! Some minor tweaking on my end to get the colors spot on, and then we’re going to do the print run. I had originally scheduled only 100 sets to be done, but know from your response that I need to do a much larger quantity. For that, I thank you so much. I hope you’ll get a LOT of information from them, and you’re going to be the first to know when I have them in my hands! Here are six of the seven fronts of the cards–can you identify the different times of day? (The cards will have some helpful text for those color bands along the bottom.)

They look a little silly all lined up like this…

You can see my entire blog here.

If you need to email me directly, please click here.

©Copyright 2008 by Elin Pendleton. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit Elin Pendleton’s website.

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Aug 30 - The Boy Finished

August 30th, 2008 | By Elin Pendleton

Although this accidentally went out before it was supposed to, I did further editing and here it is again.

It was a quick matter to put the finishing touches on this canvas while teaching in Sebastopol’s workshop. The sailboat just fell into the composition, and made a complete story. I even like that the mast is a bit bent, like things in life–showing character!

The shadow on the sails was done with yellow ochre and the “usual suspects” of ultramarine blue and white. I drilled into the students’ heads that over half of all shadows are made from the sky trio–ultramarine blue, alizarin and yellow ochre in some proportions, and it is in evidence here.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this lesson painting. It is available as I write this, although at $220 through PayPal, it might be gone before long.

The long-awaited Color System Flash Cards are AT THE PRINTER!!! I’ll be proofing them in a few days, and THEN they’ll be printed! Yippee! You all will be the first to know when they’re in my hands.
Here’s a sample of the back of one of them (the cards will be much larger):

You can see my entire blog here.

If you need to email me directly, please click here.

©Copyright 2008 by Elin Pendleton. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit Elin Pendleton’s website.

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August 26 - Back from the Workshop!

August 26th, 2008 | By Elin Pendleton

Landscape painting "before" fixing color. Copyright Elin Pendleton, all rights reserved.

I’ve returned from a wonderful five days up in Northern California, teaching the Color Boot Camp workshop and doing a demonstration for the ASW painting group in Sebastopol, about 30 minutes north of San Francisco. What fun! Great group, and the workshop was full of laughter and “head-hurts” with the Color System knowledge going in. Many made great strides towards/into good color choices for the time of day they were painting.

The demonstration paintings I did during the workshop and meeting are examples of my evolving style in how I want to have my art appear after the hiatus of last two months. It’s been wonderful to reach into the oils with such certainty about how I want the end painting to be.

It’s easy to admit that artists grow and change, but perhaps not so exciting to know that other artists also go through this. Above is a painting I did back in 2005, and one I brought to the workshop to show evening light as it can be done on location. I knew the Color System in ‘05, but hadn’t refined it enough to “pull it off” every time. That’s typical of newbies to the CS, because it takes a while before the Color System can be involved in every one of your color choices. I was still relying on the “good ol’ choices” because they were familiar.

While in the workshop, I told the students what I was going to do to the painting, and then did it. The changes are subtle, perhaps, but the overall painting has been “stepped up a notch”. Here’s the finished work.

Landscape painting "after" color-fixing demo. Copyright Elin Pendleton, all rights reserved.
You can see my entire blog here.

If you need to email me directly, please click here.

©Copyright 2008 by Elin Pendleton. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit Elin Pendleton’s website.

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