analogous colors Archives – Celebrating Color

People often say, “I Love Your Colors!” Why?

November 26, 2015 By Carol McIntyre

When people look at my work, the first thing they often say is, “I love your colors!” Of course, this makes me beam inside. Outside I smile, thank them and then ask “Why?” or “What about the colors do you like?”

When you look at these examples of my paintings, why do you think they like my colors? What is the first thought that crosses your mind?

As all artists know, color is personal. It is personal to the person arranging and mixing the colors, as well as those looking at them. We all have our personal preferences when it comes to color. And what makes it even more interesting is that these preferences can change.

Do You Love Your Colors in Your Paintings?

As I just mentioned, our color preferences are different and can change. They can be different from one room in your home to next. For example: I designed our downstairs bathroom with yellows, lime greens and apricots, which makes it funky and uplifting. Whereas our main bathroom carries the cool pastel colors for a calming affect.

You make color choices when you pick out what you wear. These choices can be impacted by where and when you don a particular color or set of colors. For example: when I attend a morning Chamber of Commerce breakfast, I wear more contrasting and bright colors versus when I attend a more sedate luncheon. When I attend an art opening what might I/you wear?

When you paint, do you love your colors? Do you choose a color palette before you begin a painting?

One of the reasons people love my colors relates to my color choices. 95% of the time, I choose the colors I want to use in a painting BEFORE I begin. Why do I do this? Because … [Read more…]

Abstracting Objects is a Brain Twister

August 20, 2015 By Carol McIntyre

Learning about abstracting objects was the objective of the enlightening workshop I took this past weekend from Annie O’Brien Gonzales , courtesy of Kimberly Conrad’s Gallery.

As you may or may not remember, I am in the mists of an artistic transition; this means that I am exploring different painting techniques. One of them is described in my recent blog post “Painted Outside of Your Box Lately?”. I thought it would be interesting to learn about Annie’s approach to abstracting still lifes because it would be my first abstract workshop.

Up to this point in my painting career, all of my learning about painting abstracts has been self-taught. My abstractions come out of my head while I am in dialogue with the painting. You can view them in my series “Abstracts With Depth.” I also love to fuse realism with abstractions in my “Windows Into Your Imagination,” but this workshop was a completely different artistic approach to abstraction.

The process for abstracting objects went approximately as follows:

First, a random under painting was applied to cover up the white surface. By the way, I often start my paintings similar to this. Hence, this process was not unfamiliar to me though it was a tad scruffier than I usually do.
Then we identified a still life or photograph for our inspiration. I chose an advertisement from a magazine.
Next I had to decide on the orientation of my 24″x30″ board. I then painted in a very rough composition using line. You can see it in yellow ochre.

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Painted Outside of Your Box Lately?

July 8, 2015 By Carol McIntyre

We artists have often heard art instructors/gurus tell us to “Paint outside of the box.” This suggestion is usually couched in the encouragement for us to stretch our current approach to painting or to further our growth as an artist.

Sounds good. Except there is a question that always pops up in my brain when I hear this. “Could you demonstrate what you mean by painting outside of the box? Or, could you give an example of what YOU did to paint outside of YOUR box?” Since I have not seen or heard an example, I thought I would share mine.

In my recent post entitled Moving My Art Studio Temporarily | Don’t Forget Chocolate!, I mentioned that I did not have a painting agenda for my month long stay at our remote mountain cabin. I had some ideas tickling my innards, but nothing was really grabbing me. Despite this rather indifferent feeling toward painting – which is unusual for me – I went ahead and started working on a 40×30 water lily painting, as seen below.

After a couple of days of looking at this painting at this early stage, I had to own up to the fact that my heart was not in it. A voice inside of me said, “I don’t want to paint this way right now.” I went to bed imagining myself scooping up large globs of paint (I don’t typically apply paint thickly) on my palette knife and covering up this image.

Then another little bird in my brain asked to me, “Carol, why not paint outside of your box?” So I dove in.

I squirted out larger than usual piles of paint onto my palette, mixed up a few more colors and went for it. First, with a large brush I painted around the water image as you see below. By the way, that is blue tape protecting the water area of the painting. For a brief moment, I considered stopping here and seeing what I might do with it, but, no, I wanted to push the envelope.

Stopping would have been safe and not really out of my comfort zone. I was up for some surprises OR something that didn’t work.

After mixing piles of complementary colors, I then removed the tape and picked up my larger palette knife . Using bright intense colors was another “outside of the box” moment. I applied the yellows, orange and greens over my previously painted ares in vertical strokes.

What have I learned so far about painting outside of my box?

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