experiments with reds...cad oranges, yellows...

Using my experiments of the last post...I took a couple prior plein airs, and over the past couple days did a couple alteration paintings.  Such I might not experiment in the field, but working to resolve such issues in-studio, will give me I think the empowerment to push and play with this emotive attack on location...

5"x 7"

This is Sunset Point, west side of Presque Isle, in Marquette Michigan.  I'll post the original to this one tomorrow...which I thought I had already done...

Here is an altercation to the one I painted awhile ago on Alderton road, which you'll see scrolling down the blog a bit..

8"x 10"

Now...I realize this is really pushing it, but one understands relationships very often by pushing to extremes...and after all, trying to paint the energy of light at such moments as last light is asking a lot of earth pigments.  8^)

I found my plein air original painted at Sunset Point this past July...and realize now why I didn't photograph and share it earlier.  The painting is okay I suppose, but starting this a half-hour before the inevitable glorious display you are likely to experience when the sun is nearing its lowest position leaves what you started and committed to feeling a bit flat or lackluster.

I am anticipating as the pattern for learning goes...that by doing in-studio exercises and experiments I can develop a knack, a feel for what on location could become an intuitive manner of working and jumping on the urgent moment.  Having resolved what color is capable of doing to do justice, the half-hour before that glory moment could be spent laying down the composition, the underpainting...mixing up the paint for the last ten minutes of the grand color push...

Such works inevitably are better smaller in the field...broader brushes, less detail...well, until I surprise myself with managing the moment more efficiently...

One way to gain that efficiency is to mentally exercise and understand the color relationships, and what you see in both my last two exercises is born of what is called a split-complementary tetrad...based then on these four colors-

Study the first two paintings posted above and you'll see these colors represented. Perfect relationships in harmonies...and thus unifying and emitting mood.

...and a reminder, all images are clickable and thus can be seen larger than viewed here...