Colour blindness

Well I think I am going to have to go colour blind.

I need to make a prefelt picture based on river edges in fully saturated colours. Well such a thing does not exist in the natural world. I have lovely pictures of rocks and Autumn leaves with swirling water, and drippy moss covered rocks with ferns hanging over them. Which need to be depicted in the colours from a rainbow and using colour values instead of shades and tones. I really do not understand the advantages of this colour value approach. I know Henry Mattise used it , but I am not sure I am up to it.


It calls for a radical approach. First I must forget the natural colours.

Orange leaves will become red , browny rocks will become warm yellow with blue to show the texture and the moss. The water needs to stays warm blue with cold blue and cold yellow to give movement.

Here is what is looked like in real life.

A painting , trying to get a grip of my colour blind scheme, and cheating a little bit by using white.

The completed prefelt. For me the beauty of felt is the way it blends together , when only prefelted this has not happened yet. So this is definelty not my favorite piece of felting .

 

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Leaves

I have spent the last week studying autumn leaves , trying to find some that meet the specification of being in clean saturated colours in red, yellow, blue , orange ,green or purple.

This is the instruction from Kate for items to first paint and then felt. Well first find the items . Most of river banks are not very portable , and there are no flowers at this time of the year. So I decided on leaves. What I knew, what everyone knows, is that the leaves look glorious en mass on the trees, and the ground , with beatiful shades of yellows, oranges, browns and reds. What I have discovered is that look up close and the individual leaves are twisted and full of holes and rarely just one colour. Of course this is not really as surprising as they have been siting in the weather for months. What I have also discovered is that if you search out some beautiful specimens and bring them home to paint, within hours they are completely dehydrated, curled up, and not the beautiful specimens you thought. I tried pressing , this worked reasonably well, for some kinds of leaves, but somehow in their desiccated state , they seemed very lifeless.

So this has had to become a speed challenge , call it speed painting. Pick the leaves , close to home , rush home, photograph immediately, for a record, and then paint. Not a very relaxing occupation for someone who is a bit of an amateur painter.

Here are some examples

Different techniques, from careful painting on the right, to reckless dabbing of colour in the left.

A magical mirror image !

So that the painting items challenge accomplished I think. What will be next?

 

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