Friday, February 24, 2012
Color Interactions
Right click on the images to open in a new page or tab so you can read the information about color interactions and Josef Albers. Have a great weekend!
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Master Copy Research Paper
Due March 15th
-Type your research paper's using Ariel font, single spaced, double space paragraphs, size 11 font - 10 points
-Include how you found the work you selected. Did you google search just the artist's name? What was the website you found the work on? Included in the first paragraph-10 points
-Name of the artist included in the first paragraph- 2 points
-Size of the artwork- 6 points
-Media/medium of artwork- 6 points
-Date the artwork was created- 6 points
-Description of artwork. Using the elements and principles describe the artwork? (Line, Value, Form, Space, Texture, Color, Shape, Repetition or Pattern, Unity, Perspective or Proportion, Balance-Asymmetrical, Radial, Symmetrical, Contrast, Movement or Rhythm, Emphasis and Variety) Use only those words that best describe your piece. -15 points
-What is the artist trying to say? Think about the dates this piece was conceived. What is going on in history that might relate? If it is a contemporary piece what is going on in his or her world right now that would cause him or her to create this? What style is it in? Are other artists working in this style? Think about what the artist is saying! -30 points
- Include additional information relating to the inconography of the work. Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. INTERPERTATION OF THE IMAGES, for example if there is an olive tree in the painting this was often used as a biblical reference, or the use of fruits was used to represent fertility. - 15 points
-Total Grade 100 points.
Monday, February 13, 2012
Water Mixable Oils
I found this on Magda Vacariu's Blog Link Here
"Water mixable oils are a relatively new invention, and even if many professional artists were skeptical about them at the beginning, they became increasingly popular. Like me, many artists discovered them because they were searching for paints easier to use, or with less toxicity. At Adelaide Central School of Art I found out the rules of safe painting. Conventional oils are not dangerous as long as you work in a ventilated space, and as long as you don't eat them, or you don't let them come into contact with your skin. Toxic solvent and turpentine can be avoided with success if you are preoccupied with your health. Unfortunately many artists don't follow the rules, and I have never given much importance myself to toxicity, till I found out with sadness that the great artist Robert Hannaford got severely ill. I had the chance to meet the artist, he encouraged me to paint portraits and advised me how to start selling.
Alfie, how he was called by friends, had the bad habit to chew on his brushes while he was caught in painting. Alfie broke the first rule of safe painting, to not eat in the studio, especially the brushes and paints. The self-portrait bellow, which was a finalist in the Dough Moran Prize, was born from this story. Alfie had to be fed with a tube in his stomach and when he was able to paint, he used disposable gloves.
After Alfie's sad experience, I felt that I needed a change, so I decided I wanted to paint in acrylics, as beautifully as my professor Chris Orchard. He was painting only in acrylics and he told me that he never managed to paint in oils. I found this impossible, as I have painted in oils since I knew myself, as a small child. And if he couldn't paint in oils, the opposite was true for me. After so many years of painting in oils, my trial to paint in acrylics was a big failure. The acrylic was drying too fast, and I wasn't able to blend any colors on the canvas. The palette seemed to dry in minutes, and my inspiration was vanishing if I had to stop continously to renew my palette with fresh paints. About paintings, what can I say, they looked unfinished, and the paint just refused to spread. Every time I ended up covering everything with oil, and a painting in acrylics became a painting in oils. After about two years of on and off acrylics, and after I asked Chris Orchard many questions, I succeeded finally to paint in acrylics.
I was able to paint in numerous techniques, and my portraits in acrylics were mistaken for portraits in oil. For a while I painted only in acrylics, enjoying the advantages of clean and fast painting. After seven years of living in Australia, I finally was able to travel through Europe. All those magnificent masterpieces painted in oil revived my first love for oil. But now I was too used to acrylics and its advantages, so I wanted something else than conventional oils. I knew about water mixable oils from a visit to Deborah Trusson's studio, by the time when I was a student in Adelaide. This self-portrait bellow, painted in Artisan water mixable oils, was sitting on an easel in the center of her studio. Trusson had been shortlisted in the Archibald Prize with this work.
The Artisan chromatic is very limited comparing to the pure and brilliant colors in high series I was used to. But the water mixable oils can be mixed with up to 30 percent conventional oils, so I continued using some of my special colors. Artisan seemed to not have quite the same coverage as the conventional oils, but in time, I got used to it.
In general, water soluble oils are exactly like conventional oils, they look the same, and behave the same, as long as you don't use water for mixing or diluting the color. Water is used only for rinsing brushes while you work, and cleaning after painting. Artisan oils come with a few mediums plus linseed oil for diluting. My favorite is the Artisan fast drying medium, which I use for the following advantages:
-the oil becomes creamier and easier to spread, easier to get very fine details
-the oil dries faster, so I can work at a painting practically every day (without this medium, you are lucky if you can work once at two or three-days, depending on the humidity level in the air and the thickness of the layers)
-this medium is useful for getting thin semi-transparent layers in the glazing technique; good for getting new colors and effects of shine and depth, for eyes, the porcelain face of a child, water, etc.
If you like experimenting, you can try water for diluting, you might get something which doesn't look like oil at all, but more like acrylics or watercolors, but be aware that the stability and durability of the paint might be affected in time when you break the rules.
Because water mixable oils don't need toxic solvents for thinning and cleaning, they are easier and more convenient to use in class rooms, in shared spaces, around children, or healthier for sensitive people. That's why I recommend Artisan colors to my students in the class room. This is what the people from Winsor and Newton say about the Artisan colors: " Purely based on the high grade of raw materials, Artisan could be considered an artists' grade, however, the inclusions of hues and the shorter palette, means that Artisan can be in fact be considered somewhere between and artists' and students' grade". :
Here is the basic palette I recommend to my students:
titan white (titan has a better coverage than zinc white)
cad yellow medium or light series II*
lemon yellow
yellow ochre
cad red light series II* (a bright orange)
cad red medium series II*
permanent alizarin crimson
french ultramarin
prussian blue
phthalo green
indian red
burnt umber
ivory black (a light black)
*Buy series II and avoid "hues", which are not made of one pigment. When you combine two colors to obtain other colors, it's better to mix colors made of one pigment only. Mixing two colors which are made of a combination of pigments can get you dark and dull colors. That's why you read everywhere that professional colors are a better choice, even for beginners. One pigment colors are easier to combine, and the results are more encouraging for beginners.
When you buy colors, get two colors for each primary, a cold and a warm one. For example lemon yellow (cold) and cad yellow (warm), or prussian blue (cold) and ultramarin blue (warm).
If you can afford buy more colors like:
zinc white (more transparent than titan white, good for mixing or transparent layers)
cad red dark seria II
magenta
viridian green
cerulean blue series II
sap green
cobalt blue
burnt sienna
Other water mixable oils are Holbein Aqua Duo and Grumbacher Max Artists Oil Colors, both for professional use. Holbein has a large range of colors, though Holbein Aqua Duo has the disadvantage of a higher price and some of the colors are not made of unique pigments. Artisan is though the most popular brand of water mixable oils in the world."
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Painting Vocabulary Review
Review the images of rectangular prisms above and practice drawing this form from various vantage points (above, at and below eye level).
Pop quiz in the near future. Make sure you know these terms!
Hue: color
Monochromatic: a color scheme derived from a single base hue, and extended using its shades, tones and tints (that is, a hue modified by the addition of black, gray (black + white) and white.
Underpainting: an initial layer of paint applied to a ground, which serves as a base for subsequent layers of paint. Underpaintings are often monochromatic and help to define colour values for later painting. There are several different types of underpainting, such as verdaccio and grisaille.
Analogous colors: colors that are adjacent to each other on the color wheel. Some examples are green, yellow green, and yellow or red, red violet and violet.
Triadic colors: The triad color scheme is three colors on the color wheel in a triangle. Example: Orange, Purple, and Green.
Complementary colors: colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel, such as blue and orange, red and green, purple and yellow. Complementary color schemes have a more energetic feel. The high contrast between the colors creates a vibrant look, especially when used at full saturation. Complementary colors can be tricky to use in large doses.
Saturation: How pure or bright a color appears. To de-saturate a color of given intensity in a subtractive system (such as paint), one can add white, black, gray, or the hue's complement.
Opaque: not transparent or translucent; impenetrable to light; not allowing light to pass through.
Transparent: having the property of transmitting rays of light through its substance so that bodies situated beyond or behind can be distinctly seen.
Local Color: the natural color of an object
Tint: a base hue plus white
Tone: a base hue plus grey or a neutral pigment.
Shade: a base hue plus black or the hue’s complement.
High & Low Key painting: A high Key painting contains values on the lighter end of the value scale, starting at 1 (lightest) and going to approximately 5 (middle value). A low-key painting is composed of predominantly darker values from 5-10 on the value scale.
Neutral color: usually means without color. Neutral colors such as beige, ivory, taupe, black, gray, and white appear to be without color, and yet in many applications these hues often have undertones of color.
Wet into Wet or Alla Prima: (Italian, meaning at first attempt), is a painting technique, used mostly in oil painting, in which layers of wet paint are applied to previous layers of wet paint. This technique requires a fast way of working, because the work has to be finished before the first layers have dried. It may also be referred to as 'direct painting' or the French term au premier coup (at first stroke)
Glazing: A glaze is simply a thin, transparent layer or coat of paint and glazing is simply building up color by applying thin, transparent layers or coats one on top of another. Each glaze modifies the color of what’s already been painted on the canvas.