I kind of like my recent still life by adding a Chinese character. So I want to explore this approach even more. The character in my today's painting means "color". A plateful of peppers with various colors matches this meaning. This new approach makes me pay more attentions to the execution methodology of a painting, which I don't know much about. When I did my "light" painting, I really had a hard time painting wet-on-wet for the character and background. The character needs high accuracy to maintain its calligraphic beauty and the background needs to be uniform. So wet-on-wet is not a good way to do it. For today's painting, I used acrylic for the background. It dried about 30 minutes, then I painted the character on top. I also learned from doing this painting that dark colors needs a relatively large area to show its value. I used burnt umber plus a touch of white for the background. Its value is around "3" in a 10 scale value range. When I started, it looks black to me in contrast to the white painting board. After I covered the board and wrote the character on it. The background looked significantly lighter. It seemed I got my pupils dilated. On this background, my colors for the peppers are so bright. I used almost all out-of-tube colors for them. This painting is an eye opener for me, literally.
Hi Qiang,
ReplyDeleteFirstly, congratulations on completing your studies at AAU. What a grate job you have done on those figure paintings! You have mention a problem with painting wet-on-wet, when doing your Chinese character painting. I think there is a solution to this problem. Watching the tutorials of the artist Daniel Edmondson, I have learned the trick of removing unwanted paint out of the background with a Q - tip. A good idea is to use the cheap, less fuzzy Q-tips you can by in "a dollar store".
Anyway, Thank you for being such a great inspiration!
Peter.