Lesson 3.1 – Colour Families – part 2

Today I finished my ‘Green Colour Family’ picture.

First I painted flat colour (which wasn’t as flat as I wanted becuase I was trying to use dried out paint):

 

Then I added shadows and highlights to this mid-tone starting point.  I was aiming for a surreal slightly abstract look with smooth transitions between different tones and sharp divisions between objects.    Here’s how it turned out:

Its not how I saw it in my mind and I’m surprised at how yellow the green/yellow sky looks.  I wonder if my camera adjusted the colour balance?  (I’m pretty sure it’s not set up to do that.  I keep it on ‘P’ mode which means than I am required to make all my adjustments manually.  My dad taught me to use an SLR when I was young – so I still work to those kind of ideas.)

Also, oddly enough, the trunk of the tree, which was less smooth than I was aiming for, looked better to me in the end than the stuff which ended up as smooth as I’d been planning.

As you can see the owl, which is my focal point, has some red mixed in to it’s colour.  This breaks my rule about using only shades of green, but I thought that it would make him stand out.

I called the painting ‘Greenhills‘.