Colour & tone

[bunn]

I went to an artists group meeting yesterday evening where someone was talking about her art (silk-screen printing using old maps and letters) they were pretty, but not entirely to my taste.   I liked the idea of them, but visually they were a bit too... similar, I suppose.  But perhaps I should have seen them in the reality : she had brought a slideshow, but it's not the same.

Anyway, after that bit, we did a painting exercise looking at colour and tone : the idea being that when you are looking at colours, it can be hard to work out if the tone is a pale one or a dark one. She gave us a black and white card, and we had to paint the tones in it using colours, with the aid of a phone, which we used to change the colours to black and white so we could see the tones and not the colours we were painting with. 

I don't know if that makes any sense.  This was the original card I got to paint:


So I put my paints on the paper, and photographed them in black and white for a reference, then I tried to use the black and white photo of the colours as a reference.  This is what I ended up with.



Turn it back to black and white and you get this, which is not unlike, I think.


I wished I'd used more reds and less yellows.  Blue and red is perhaps more pleasing than blue and yellowy colours like buff titanium.  Or perhaps I should have mixed shades rather than using them straight from the tube.  Still, it was a fun exercise and I had not thought of pulling all the colour out of an image like that.

Comments

[anthean]

funny, this is a trick I've used for selecting colors of yarn to knit with. If you're knitting a sweater with a color pattern, you typically don't want the colors to be too similar in tone because you won't be able to see the intricacies of the pattern very well. One way to check this when you're selecting colors is to photograph the yarn in black and white before you start knitting.

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

I rather like the color scheme. It is reminiscent of Van Gogh.

[timetiger.livejournal.com]

I love reading about your art stuff. If I make it out of my MA program alive, I hope to take an art class.

And do Tai Chi
And volunteer at the Field Museum
And have my apartment painted

But first I'm gonna soak up the pleasure of not committing myself to *anything* for months and months.

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I do love reading about these exercises.

I know I haven't quite got the hang of tone. I get a lot of disappointing results when trying to convert colour photos to black and white.