"Monet's Garden in Spring"

Today, I came out of my color research and temporarily to the real world. I did this painting from a ref photo from the Monet's garden. I did not do any color tweaking. So the painting is rather representational.

I know the country is open for business, but I still follow the common sense and stay at home as much as I can. It is so sad that today the death of Covid-19 has reached 100,000. I hope all of you are safe.

"Water Lilies in Blue 2"

This is my 2nd try of the same painting. From the previous one, I have learned that I might have shift the reference photo too far to the blue, so the scene has deviated too far from the reality. With the 2nd attempt, I toned the ref photo a little less to maintain most of green colors, but the painting still has a dominant color tone to unify the color scheme. The trial and error approach gradually trains my sensitivity in establishing my color sense. It is tedious, but necessary.

"Water Lilies in Blue"

I manipulated the color of a photo I took in Monet's Garden in France a couple of years ago. I want the scene has a dominant color tone. Might be I over did the color shifting, and the image starts to look like a nocturne. I did a small painting to see the effect. This is a preparation for a future large painting

"Red and Green"

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This is dangerous. Red and green are almost complimentary. It is rather difficult to harmonize these two colors together, but I did it anyway. Do I like this color scheme? I don't know. It is kind of interesting.

"Green Yellow Scheme 050820"

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Continuing on my color scheme research. Yellow and green can be analogous, but we need to be careful. When I paint this one, I significantly tone down the chroma of the green to almost gray. If both yellow and green have high chroma, the scheme may not work. If the green is darker, it will be even worse. On the color wheel, yellow sits between orange and green, and we all know yellow and orange get along well. They can form a very harmonious analogous scheme, by why green and yellow can not getting along?

"Complementary color scheme test 050620"

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This is another test of my color research. Today's scheme is complementary colors: red and turquoise. As a matter of fact, "color scheme design" is a big topic. It does not have to have any realistic base. How should we group a set of colors together and make a good presentation? I don't have adequate amount of information to answer this question. That is one of my purposes of doing this research. The colors of my paintings (this one and previous one) are NOT from my still life setup. I got on the internet and searched for "color palettes for website designs", and decide which online palette I want to use. Then I choose objects and background drapery to match as much as possible to computer color palette. I also plot the colors on the color wheel so I know which category of schemes the set of palette belong to. So I had a complementary one today and an analogous one last time.

"Harmony with warm colors"

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This simple painting has shown the fruition of my color research. After getting deeply into color theory and measurement using math, and strategies of color mixing, now I move onto aesthetics, color psycologry and color scheme design. This one uses an analogous color scheme centered at warm yellow. It has developed from my earlier monochromatic scheme with yellow. The palette I used for this painting was burnt umber, yellow ochre, cad yellow lemon, cad yellow deep, cad orange, cad red light, quinacridone magenta, radiant red, and white. I did tested this color scheme on the computer first. Science does work.

"Still life under cool light"

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This is another daily painting exercise. I used all cool colors to obtain an analogous color scheme to maintain harmony. The paintwork is rather rough to give a painterly look. I will tweak this color scheme more to make it work even better. If you have any suggestions, Please let me know. I appreciate it.

Red and Green are NOT Complementary, Neither Purple and Yellow

If you have painted for a while, you probably have known that red and green are not true complementary colors, either from your color mixing experiences or from your study. If you just started painting, I hope you are learning the correctly way. I did this color mixing demonstration to show that red and green mix together will make a brown or dark yellow, and purple and yellow will make similar brownish color, but they are not neutral grey. The true complementary color for red is turquoise (or cyan). Not a long ago, I have shown you the limitation of the red, yellow, blue color mixing. We have seen so many problems of this system. I don't know why so many color teachings are still following the wrong path.