Playing with Color

Color mix swatches

For Untitled #5 I set myself the challenge of working in a high intensity red range. Partly because I want to see what effect the color and intensity change has on the transparent veils I paint, but also because red is not my favorite color to use. It's good to shake things up a bit!

Since I was less familiar with these colors and their potential in mixes, I spent many happy hours playing with color swatches resulting in all those red swatches in the photo.

A lot of that time was spent to figure out four starting points that would result in transparency mixes that a) the viewer can distinguish and b) I can actually mix. I started using reds as my base colors but that gave me too many indistinguishable mixes which I felt would result in confusing transparencies.

Color mix pyramid

My final color choices and the approximate mixes became those in the mix pyramid. These were small quantity mixes to help me find a starting point. The next step was to start mixing up enough of each color and each mix to finish the painting. This is when I get out my transparency grids and have to be very, very picky about the color. A couple of the mixes - the more extreme, like purple and yellow, and the closest, like purple and magenta, took multiple tries to get right.

Untitled #2 - the finished painting

Untitled #2

©2010 Caroline Roberts

24"x24" acrylic on canvas

Ta-dah! I managed to stop before I got perfectionist and started fussing about edges being smooth to the molecular scale. It's a fine line (bad pun intended).

I started the next painting, excitingly titled "Untitled #3" - bet you didn't see that one coming. I pretty much agree with Rauschenberg that paintings are like children: you have to name them something. The trouble is choosing a name that leaves the viewer to interpret as they wish. "Untitled" seems so much less intriguing than, say, "Ortho" , or even "Fred".

However, I am now going to scrap that new canvas and start again. It took a bit of soul-searching to decide that, after all, several hours went into laying it out and blocking in some colors. But in the end I believe it will pay off.

Unfortunately I decided to try and reuse a canvas and the uneven layer of paint is preventing me from achieving the smooth surface and lines that I want, despite sanding and gessoing. The brush sticks and drags as it goes across the old paint in an annoying way that doesn't happen on a nice, fresh canvas. Luckily, since I stretch my own it will "only" involve pulling the old canvas off (embedding a few staples in fingers as I go) and stretching a new canvas onto the bars.

Really, it's for the best. Now I know not to reuse canvas for these flat planes. But will I ever learn anything without making a mistake first?

Work in progress: Untitled #2, day 2

Untitled #2 - work in progress, day 2

©2010 Caroline Roberts

The greys are blocked in now and color adjustment is underway. I carried out the overlay exercise below to check that the mixes are good and to see where I need to adjust hue or value. It's hard to judge the mixes, especially the hue, on the painting itself. If only color wasn't so relative!

After remixing a couple of colors - the grey-aqua mix is much too saturated and aqua for instance - I will repaint those areas and get the edges sharp. Each time I have to adjust a color the paint layer gets thicker and it gets harder to keep the surface smooth. Particularly as I get impatient and try to rework an area before it is fully dry. Hard to believe, but sometimes I have to actually wait for my acrylic paint to dry.

Each painting teaches me more about how my process needs to be and what my paintings are about. For a while I have wondered why I am so drawn to hard edges in my own work when I love soft, atmospheric brushwork in others' paintings. Working in these mid tones, with so many greys, it would be so easy to lose the color changes and the transparency illusion.

Color Overlay Exercise

I already have my eye on the next painting. Something else small (the one above is 24" by 24", which is small for me), I'm not ready to work on that huge crazy-detailed painting yet but it is my goal. A painting you could step into.

I'd love to hear what you think about this painting - do the overlays work for you? Are they interesting? I love them but that doesn't mean everyone shares my obsession with transparencies and overlays!

Work in Progress: Untitled #2

Untitled #2 - work in progress

©2010 Caroline Roberts

I am back in the studio this week and, after a few days of pootling around with warm-up stuff like gessoing canvases and playing with colored paper, I have returned to the series I started around March. I am experimenting with the process, trying to balance planning with the need to remain sane. I used glazes of the approximate colors as a way of starting in Untitled #2 here, something I have not done before. Below is another work in progress that is currently on the backburner until I work out the process. The complicated shapes and the color balances could easily drive me crazy.

Untitled #2 is a working title - I'm thinking of giving the whole series a title, but what? Maybe Fugue - I think of each color as a 'voice' that has to work in harmony with the others. The areas of flat color are a first stab at getting these colors to work together. I think they may be too vivid, but since these are all the most colorful mixes it's hard to tell. Tomorrow I'll block in the grey tones before I decide. I'll post the next stage and I would really value your opinions on the colors.

Untitled crazymaker painting

©2010 Caroline Roberts