On The Contrary

You may remember the Underground photo's I took after which I started to paint.

Today I continued with a detail of one of the pictures to begin with.


Detail of picture, interesting color bit (pink)

Iain, my instructor in Painting, advised me to mask off some of the picture's details to concentrate fully on the selected part...


Interesting part - focal point - shown through masked off picture

If I would get the interesting bit right I would only have to worry about its context. So I made several layers of color - the order of which is NOT important - on my painting paper to get to the same detailed surface as in the picture.


First, red and white (makes pink)


and white


Then yellow


and blue


followed by more white in my 'Sandwich' of colors as Iain would like to call it.


Some yellow and blue (makes green) in addition


followed by yet more white.


This resulted in a mix of pink, interesting enough to serve as my point of attention.

Iain then explained that in order to attract the viewer to the point of interest, the 'eventful' bit needed a contrasting ' uneventful' counterpart. 'Bright versus Dimmed', 'Light versus Dark', 'Active versus Passive', that is all what COMPOSITION is about.

He drew a sketch of black coal on a paper to exemplify his statement.


Sketch of contrast next to painting so far.

He also showed me two examples of paintings that used contrast (in color and surface):


Example 1: Blue versus grey, soft versus sketchy, clutter versus straight edges


Example 2: Yellow versus grey, soft versus sketchy, clutter versus straight edges

My 'uneventful parts' would be somewhere around the bottom of the paper as noted by the grimly smilies.


Deliberately assigned 'uneventful parts', to make the pink part more 'poetic'.

Therefore I introduced a dark-green kind of edge to my painting.

Contrasting the fluffy pink

And added some sky to the top to cover the white...


The contrast doesn't always have to be dark versus light, it can be two colors that are quite distinctive as green and pink.

Finally, I expanded the pink to fill up the gaps, and thus is what resulted from today's painting efforts.



Two more weeks on Painting before Christmas break. I've learnt a lot already, but need to practice more!



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