Color Studies of Mattapoisett River

On Mondays I teach an advanced class all day. I encourage people to experiment but I’m usually the only one doing it!  Yesterday I decided to play with color for a potential square painting of the Mattapoisett River in early morning light. I worked from a black and white photo and interpreted it loosely.  I used 7 x 7 pieces of UArt (the strips cut from the 20 x 20s).  All but the last one (lower right) were done solely with hard pastels–a combination of Faber Castell Polychromos and NuPastels. The last one was done this morning at home using my Terry Ludwig vibrants set and some Giraults. I began with the sky color and used different colors in each: clockwise from upper left: orange, blue, pink, and green. I’ve done many types of color studies over the years and often don’t do them at all. For these studies, I didn’t limit the palette and I applied warm over cool, cool over warm in many different layers. The one in upper right came out the coolest and is probably my favorite; the one below it is the warmest and my least favorite (which says something about my taste in colors).  None of these have much relation to the photograph, which was totally green.  I did add some greens in the upper right and lower left and this gives it a little more realistic look. But I wasn’t really aiming for that. It was more about shape, value, and temperature balance. I really liked what happened in the foreground grasses in the upper left picture, where I began with warm colors and layered a greenish blue on top.  This is a good way of creating those odd sundown-type colors that are so hard to define.   Playing is fun!  I encourage everyone to do it–don’t just work on one painting after another.