Advanced Painting - Project 1

Using custom chroma strings, I created a painting using a simple, analogous harmony with yellow and green-yellow. My still life simply includes an apple, a grapefruit, and a wooden block. Although not the most interesting objects, I created an interesting composition showing adequate negative space and incorporated a wide range of values and chroma saturation to portray a true sense of form and depth. I Included an accent where the apple and the wooden block meet - this shows that the apple sits on the block and creates a middle ground, foreground, and background to work with. Because the cast shadows and negatives spaces are painted in low chroma with blended edges, the sense of atmosphere definitely shows throughout the piece. By modeling the objects using a variety of brush strokes and edges, I feel that I have successfully achieved my goal of creating an interesting painting with a simple, analogous harmony.

After customizing high to low key chroma strings of orange, violet, and green, I created a balanced, triadic harmony in this painting of an apple, a grapefruit, and a wooden block. Because the composition shows a balance of negative and positive space, along with the balance of the color scheme, the piece is highly interesting to look at. The high to low key chroma strings, and the variation in value create form. The high saturation of the objects pulls the objects forward, compared to the low chroma saturation of the background, and creates atmospheric depth. The harder edges of the objects against the background pulls the objects forward as well. The blended edges of the low chroma cast shadows flows from one object to another, allowing for more depth. By modeling the objects with various brush strokes and well defined accents and highlights, form and visual weight are evident in this piece. Because this piece is not too overworked, I feel that it effectively exhibits a triadic harmony with three balanced hues and an interesting composition, as opposed to painting the local hues.





My final piece of the series is painted with a complementary color scheme of blue and orange. I chose to do a complementary color scheme because the contrasting harmony is a lot different from simple or balanced harmonies, as exhibited in the first two pieces. Although challenging at times, the process remained the same. By modeling the objects with a variation in scale of the brush strokes, I felt that I had created a piece as interesting as the first two. Like the analogous color scheme, incorporating only two hues into the piece was the most difficult part; Painting a sense of form, depth, and visual weight with only blue and orange to work with was tough, yet achievable. I was satisfied with the results, regardless of the challenges I had faced.