These procedures encourage and enable me focus more on seeing and generating the colors that will work in a harmonious fashion in the painting. In future Blog posts I will report more on how specifically I choose and use the color pools. In this post I want to relate several specific techniques that were both surprising and useful!
The following photo depicts the current state of progress on my Empire State Building painting.
In working on the clouds, I wanted a warm white to represent the direct illumination of the clouds by the warm evening sun. I decided yellow ochre would supply the warmth I wanted. There fore I wanted to establish a "yellow ochre" color pool. The following photo depicts my pallet and my steps in making my "Yellow Ochre" color Pool.
To get the paint for the warm highlights of the clouds, I merely took small portions of the yellow brown mix and added various amounts of white until I got the various clouds tones that I wanted. This can be seen in the warm white pool directly below the yellow brown mixture. It gave me the colors that i wanted!
I then needed some warm red red clouds. I was trying to think of what red to use. I suddenly realized that the warm red that I had mixed to get my ochre would be just right, So I mixed various amounts of this with white. The resulting pool of color is in the bottom center of the pallet. I then needed some purple for the undersides of the clouds. I just combined some of the warm red from the center of the pallet with some of the blue mixtures that I had been using for the clouds. The resulting mixtures on the right center of the pallet.
I was surprised the realize that my color pools had lead to create all of the colors that i needed. Since all of the resulting colors were actually created from my once center pool of warm red, I was guaranteed to achieve color harmony in my clouds. I was amazed that the color pool process had naturally lead me to a harmonious solution with out me really thinking about it!
I want to cover one other useful tool in this post. As you can see from the photo of the painting, I am adding many small details and shapes such as windows, shadows, water tanks, etc.. The following photo depicts a very useful tool for this fine work, my color shaper.
Well I better get back to painting!