Starbucks

A very clean, more commercial looking painting. Kept vaguely to the project but as this is a gift I've tried to keep it relatively broad and decorative.

Fields of colour fields

Not exactly what I had in mind for the next stage but it was good fun. Much easier that I thought too. I always look at pieces like this and am in awe at the artists understanding of colour.

I've gone for a sort of easy on the eye, could fit in with your decor somewhere approach as this is more of a gift for someone than a conceptual or exploratory piece although I did learn from it. Some of the colours need switching to make it work totally and some need a second coat. I really want to do the background as vertical stripes of the same colour scheme to see how they interact but that could end up being a bit mad for the person who's present it is' taste.

The top one is how it's been completed so far and the bottom 3 are just me playing around with possible colourings in photoshop.

2 tone field drawings

Tonight I had a bit of a play with gel pens again. I love working with gel pens. The ink sits on the page like paint and comes out of the pen at a consistent thickness and tone making you have to draw in a certain way. My recent paintings have been very much influenced by working with gel pens, especially the vertical lined backgrounds.

Illustrators working with just black ink have to employ various techniques to build up tone, such as cross hatching, repeating straight lines, scribbling, repeating dots (stippling) or circles in a grid or isometric pattern or even more loosely and randomly.

I like to play around with these in more experimental ways. Changing the size and thickness and direction of these tonal marks can suggest form or distance. I have played around with this quite a lot.

I'm very interested in what happens when you use these marks which are used to create the illusion of tone in a more abstract way. For example, using these instead of colour in the instance of colour field painting:

  

Kenneth Noland: Drought

Mark Rothko: Black on Maroon

These "colour fields" could easily be "texture fields" or "tonal fields" or "pattern fields". It's something I plan to play around with over the coming weeks.

I did some rough freehand gel pen drawings this evening to try out some 2 tone textured field drawings. I also played with them in photoshop to try seeing how colour might interact with them in various ways.

Reflecting on the past few weeks work.

When attempting to start a new project I usually start with random marks, or a work a very vague concept without too much care and just see what happens. After a few of these I reflect on what I've done and see if I can find anything in those images worth running with. The concept tends to change and refine very quickly as I go. I don't like the concept to restrain the work.


This is how my project has developed so far

I liked the idea of exploring grids so I ran with that. This painting ended up being quite interesting in it's own right. I think it has a lot of potential for further exploration although it took a lot of time for a tiny rough painting and having not really used paints much before I thought it better to leave this approach for later and work on things that would build up both my understanding of working with paint and also colour.

These were interesting but not particularly well composed. On reflection I think there's a lot of unnecessary stuff going on in there too. The idea behind it was vaguely similar to a colour field painting but using textures or patterns of the same colour combinations instead of different flat colours to create shapes and see how they interact.

 

Although these do work on some level, compositionally they aren't great and I think there is too much going on, especially in relation to my own limited experience with working with colour and paint. I think they need to be stripped right down. I think this photoshop mockup works better than all of them.

Even so, I think limiting my palette even more so is the way to go for now. Also taking out the thick borders and seeing how the textures interact without any breaks.