Helpful Hints for the Artist #6
Orchestrating color in a landscape
When we start to paint a landscape, nature presents us with an overwhelming variety of colors and shapes. As artists we must have the sensitivity to react to this wonderful display, but one of our main tasks is to select and simplify. Although we must train our eyes to see subtle variations of color, we must also learn to orchestrate these different colors so that they work together to create unity in a paintaing—rather than a confusing competition, with each color trying to attract the viewer’s attention. In other words, we must first organize a painting in such a way that a few large areas of color and value fit together to fill the picture in a way that might be compared to a jigsaw puzzle.
Here are two exercises you can use to develop a good approach to expressing different moods or feelings in pictures:
1. Rule several 4x5 inch boxes. Now write a single-word title under each box describing a mood, such as excited, gloomy, angry,etc. Next fill in each box with three or four colors that will best express the chosen mood. The shapes of these colors can either be abstract or they can roughly suggest natural scenes. They should be free and loose, however, and not detailed.
2. Make several 4x5 inch pencil sketches of pictorial subjects, with or without figures in them. Write a single-word title under each sketch describing the mood you want it to suggest. Now, paint in the colors that will best express that mood.
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