8 in by 10 in Acrylic Painting
For the most part, I wasn’t the art star in elementary school. On the last day of the fifth grade, my retiring art teacher saw the flower I was drawing. She said, “Wow, your use of color.”
I think my use of color is a huge part of my practice. I am first and foremost an intuitive artist, and that goes for my use of color. However, there are some preferences.
My high school art teacher discouraged us from using black. He wanted us to learn the fundamentals before adding a difficult color. I used black with this notebook design as a 32 year old.
I believe I had success. If you like it, buy one yourself.
https://bleedingacrylic.com/cart/
Still. I don’t like black, escpecially for making other colors darker. Use a darker color- like dark purple or blue. My high school art teacher taught us a very specific color palette. All you need is red, yellow, blue, and white. As a 33 year old, I add some green to this palette. I’ve heard of other palettes, too. This is just what I use. He taught me that with portraits, you use yellow, purple and red. Then you color correct. He also had a thing about blue that came straight from the tube. He told us we had to make it different and more nuanced than the blue he called boring. No straight-from-the-tube blue. I also have this thing with the color brown. It’s necessary for realistic portraits, but I’m a fauve. An old man at the mental hospital called me that. I use unusual colors, essentially. Not natural ones. I just refuse to use black with brown as the main colors. My first painting was in the 7th grade. It was my deceased dog, Flea. I used brown and black and it was very good. Sometimes, I think my distaste for the color combo comes from a memory of a popular girl noticing my brown and black outfit and saying I clashed. I doubt it, though.That would be an immature reaction to that exchange. I just think it isugly. Another color combo I hate is red, blue and purple. It’s ick to me. I don’t know why.
What are my favorite color combos? I do a lot of complementary colors, especially red and green. It’s because many artists might avoid Christmas colors and I like to be different. That goes for Barney colors, too. I like purple and yellow, too, like in the first image of this entry. I like to add other colors to complicate the work.
My favorite color to wear? Pink. It’s my confidence color. However, my all-time favorite color is yellow, like Van Gogh. How did this become my favorite color? Well, when I was 6, my mom told me I was born a monkey and she said she captured me on a safari. I really took this to heart. All I painted at arts and crafts were bananas and I only would go on the monkey bars. And yellow became my favorite color. This experience was me being a performance artist.
Back in March, I did a series of Sharpie drawings, and the colors played more of a role than normal. Example: I only did red on the skin if they were really strong personalities, like Frida Kahlo.
With the drawing below, I had to start over. I didn’t get her stomach right. However, it was more about the color. Blue was so not her.
It’s an understanding of color that I don’t know how to explain further than this post. I know it sounds like I think about it a lot, but I’m going too hard and too fast in order to overthink it.