Monday, October 01, 2012

class demo on warm and cool

 
Here's a portrait study of an imaginary person that I did as a demo for the digital painting class that I'm teaching. The focus was on color saturation and how that relates to color temperature. The excercise was to do a head study using just one hue and to vary the saturation of that hue to produce warm and cool colors. From that point, it's not much of a jump to go to full color with varied hues. The image above started out as the top left version in the image below.

 
I still remember the day I had the realization that the key to being able to paint was understanding the relativity of warm and cool. Once I started to figure that out, I started to feel like I knew what I was doing when painting. Well, sort of. So that's what I try to teach in my class: values, then warm\cool, then full color.

3 comments:

  1. It was great to meet you too Dave, fantastic work here on your site! I'm particularly stunned by paintings like the ones for the magnificent 12, the backlit tree from your painting class and the ipad sunset from August 5.

    Cheers,

    Nathan

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  2. Do you teach online anywhere?

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  3. I never thought about how lowering the saturation in a blue hued painting would warm it up. My mind is blown.

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