Creative color Design

In this assignment, we were asked to create a painting which included 84 tints and shades of all the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. In order to understand colors, and color mixing before starting, we experimented with painting a value scale of both a primary, and secondary color to enhance our skills. My creation includes a snow capped mountain landscape, with green fields on the foreground. In order create this, I used acrylic paints, and first started with the background, using darker shades of blues and oranges for the sun, and a stary sky. I soon realized that I did not have all my shades or tints of orange, so I therefore spotted in orange flowers in the field.

My work is centered around the idea of value. In order to create our work, we hard to use seven tints and shades of fourteen colors! To keep track or so many colors, we used a spread sheet that allowed us to see what colors were left. A tended to save my lighter tints of each color for highlights on the mountain crests, and stars in order to create emphasis on the steep slopes of the mountain sides that were used with darker colors. When I first started painting, my project seemed flat, and there was little 3D aspect to it like there should have been with mountains. To fix this, I went in with the lightest tints on a palette knife and cut ridges in the mountains.

There is no particular story behind my artwork. I am inspired of the mountains, and thought that bringing all this color would illuminate and bring light to their natural beauty. Last summer we visited Switzerland, and hiked in the Swiss Alps, I was inspired by this incredible experience. I am most proud of changing what I did not like, and being able to adapt and change this. The sky was once full of brownish-oranges, and I decided to cover this up with visible brushstrokes of dark values of blue and stars to highlight the wanted oranges seen at the center of the sun. I struggles with including ALL the colors, to overcome this struggle, I was surprised when I realized that there are many places where there are the potential for more colors. (i.e. the flower patches, highlights on the mountains, stars) I also struggles with creating a 3D effect int eh mountain, this is something that I still think could be stronger, I tried to revise this aspect by taking a palette knife with lighter values and creating sharp edges in the mountain sides, I wish I added more of this effect.