Color is one of the most powerful tools in an artist’s tool kit, but it can also be complex and confusing. Teaser question: can you tell me what colour scheme my Cup and Saucer painting was painted in? (answer at the bottom of post) the fundamentals of colours, how they are created and how they relate to one another; basic…
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to use the same medium that Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Edouard Manet and one of my favourites, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec used? Pastels are easy to use, available in wide ranges of colours and one of the most direct ways of applying pigment to a paper or canvas. Hosted by Attic Studios,…
Exercise 1. Colour Wheel Exercises These exercises are designed to go along with Lesson 1 and Lesson 2 of the Art Basics series by Christel Mol Dellepoort, pastel artist. If you’d like to use them to teach from in a class room or group setting, please contact me for ready-to-print handouts of these exercises and the lesson plans. Below is an…
So we’ve figured out the basics about the colour wheel, right? Well, partly so. We’ve discussed primary, secondary and tertiary colours in Art Basics – Lesson 1, but the world is made up of a lot more than just those 12 colours. Reports vary, but the general consensus is that the human eye can distinguish over 7 million different colours!…
So you want to be an artist, eh? 😉 Because we don’t live in a black-and-white world, let’s start with getting an understanding of how colours work together and how a tool most artists still use all the time, the colour wheel, came into existence. In 1666 Sir Isaac Newton was the first to develop the colour wheel. He saw…
Today I spent another 3 hours or so on the ‘Ballerina in repose’ oil painting, at Attic Studios, my ‘studio away from home’. Essentially today I ended up spending most of the time trying to mix the right colours and tones for the skin colour on her legs and arm. Skin tones are a challenge! I also spent quite some…