More of England

After I quit painting my wild and crazy version of Cambridge, I decided to go wild with brushwork but stay truer to color with a painting of Windsor Castle. The goal was to show a soft view of the castle but not too fairy-tale. It is 8x12, and I ran out of time in class, so this is what one hour produced:

I under painted each block of color in its complementary color. So the castle was a yellow, the front tree was purple, and the green tree was red. My overall color scheme would be considered purple/yellow although it almost goes purple, green, orange.

Sometimes It Just Doesn't Work

I was working on the painting of the canal that I posted earlier, but despite help from my teacher, it is one of my fails.

There are a lot of things that worked for it: the composition led the eye pleasantly, the colors provided  movement and contrast, and there were a lot of areas of complementary color. I also think the brushwork to the right of the paining was pretty good. But there was a lot that just didn't work for me. I could have kept working it, but I gave myself permission to give up. Maybe one day I will go back and start over with looser brushwork.

I have to admit it was fun to colorize Cambridge, UK! There was not a day of good sunshine when I visited, so if I want color, I have to invent it.

With the Kids: Painting Complementary Colors

Most of the time my kids get to work on paper, but occasionally, they get to do a special project on canvas. (Read: VERY BIG deal for them)

On paper, if they totally disregard whatever it is that we are doing, I'm okay with that. But on canvas, I try to keep them a little more on task. A bunch of canvas that end up brownish-gray is not too fun.

One of the ways I try to keep them on task is to give them a limited color palette. In this case, we were working with blues and blues complement, orange. They had a choice to paint water and boats or water and orange fish. Both of my kids chose to paint boats (I guess they take after me). We did this project with a friend who painted fish, but I forgot to take a picture of his painting.

The other technique that the kids were starting to learn here was how to gradually change the color of the blue paint using white. You can see in my daughter's painting (5 yrs old) that the water lightened as it went down the canvas.