Having got out a pile of fabrics for the previous exercise, I need to move them out of the danger area, well, away from the paints anyway.
I mentioned in an earlier post that moving my work area upstairs made life easier.....
There's a nice soft bed, a pile of fabrics, and, if they get thirsty - there's always the painting water!!!!!
I now need to look for a postcard of a painting, or an image from my collection of resource material that is rich in colour for this exercise.
Exercise 3: We are asked to choose an image, to mask off an area and to record the colours as accurately as possible.
It sounds similar to the last exercise - again, concentration is required, patience and a little confidence in my abilities to mix a good range of colours.
I have decided to use acrylic and watercolour paints for this exercise, they are more transparent and are richer in colour than the gouache paint.
Having looked through my resource material I settled on an image by a Bahraini artist, Rashid bin Khalifa Al Khalifa, this is the book the work features in:
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| rashid, 40 years of painting |
The introduction of this book is written by Modhir Ahmed in 2008 (Sweden).
He tells us, "Shortly before his death, Picasso asked, "What is colour?" After 85 years of a relationship with colour he couldn't define it" - I feel this gives me a little longer to understand colour as a whole, maybe I should work really hard on these exercises after all?
Modhir goes on to say, "For me, colour can be seen but it can never be felt. It can never be expressed. It is absorbed into a personal vision, charged with emotional inferences." - Summing up accurately the emotions we are being asked to express in the world of colour and the mixing of paint throughout project 3.
This is the image I chose:
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| Fragmented figures III 2008 |
I really liked this image, several "fragmented figures" are featured in the book, all are colourful, all are beautiful, all feature the female figure.
Having chosen the image I then had to mask off an interesting area 5cm:
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| The image with a viewing frame |
There is a lot going on across the picture, so, I moved the viewing frame around until I was happy with the chosen area.
The viewing frame allowed me to concentrate on the area:
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| The masked area |
Mixing the colours was fun, you know the colour you want to create, but it takes a while to find the right balance of colours.
The idea was not to copy the image, but to record the colours as accurately as possible.
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| The masked area painted - colours annotated by the side |
Using a dabbing technique allowed me to stop trying to re-create the image perfectly.
This was the finished sample - the hardest part, apart from the many layered colours I could see, was not to copy the image, just record the colours.
Conclusion:
I was glad I chose acrylic and watercolours in preference to gouache for this exercise, I think the matt finish of the gouache paint would have made matching the colours very difficult.
The layers of colour in the image made accurate matching very hard. I tried to work around this and added hints of the underneath colours, (in the masked off area), to the sample.
I feel that colour matching and colour mixing will become easier as time, and the course work progresses.
There is a value in recreating part of a picture that you find interesting, it makes you look harder at it, and I think it may also help you understand what it is you like about the image.
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Finished page:
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| Mixing and matching colour to an image |
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