I guess I coined the personal term for floating colors on art substrates. Again, once you know the rules of shading and getting the face shadows and planes down, you can break all the rules. It means you are just going to allow your memory of such rules to go wild. It is allowing your intuition to do the painting.
Here are some color suggestions (we do not like ‘rules’, do we?) for mixing colors.
Make sure you have a lot of yellow ochre because it is a great underpainting for skin tones. When mixed with reds, it can be darkened, lightened, or even grayed. Black and white are only for tinting, toning and shading. When you add white to a color, you tint it. If you want to tone it, you add a gray. If you add black to a color, you get a shade of that color. For skin colors, you can add white to cad yellow, naples yellow, zinc yellow or cadmium orange. For darker skin you add brunt sienna, burnt umber, ultramarine blue, or alizarin crimson. Again, you can shade them by adding some black. To gray a color, you can add green, blues, oranges, yellows or white plus blue. Be careful about amounts you add. Practice playing with these concepts and you will ‘get it'.
Always put a good bit of paint on your palette so that, when mixing, you do not run out. I use leftover paints for backgrounds on art journal pages. When you are going to mix colors, dab don’t stir the color or you will get a dull, flat, color. In fact, I often pick up several colors on my one brush using sides and middle for the different colors.
Abstract art is wonderful to experience so give it a go. It does not mean big shapes of colors, it means to use colors experimentally. The dabbing of my brush into multi colors gives flicks of interesting colors showing up. As well, not having rigid shapes of colors makes an interesting portrait. Flowing patterns that are layered, and splotched can add a great deal of interest to an abstract sort of portrait.
I use a stenciling brush to dab so that colors meld beautifully and not leave you with rigid lines of color. Rigid lines, stop the flow of the eye.
I use Stablio All, in black, brown or white to do detailing once I have the face nearly finished. Stabilo All pencils are water soluble and you can soften the lines with water, if the painting asks you for that.
Working with splotches of color helps quieten your critical inner voice. If you are a perfectionist and get frustrated, try breaking those rules you are trying to do perfectly. It is liberating. Sometimes you can start by splotching color on to your substrate and then finding the face. Give yourself permission to experiment. That is the key. Remember about the muscle memory? Well, it will fall into shading and highlighting with different colors when you free yourself to allow it to happen.
Play with color... play with layering colors. Play… that is key and the more you play the more the thrill when a splotch painting turns into something that touches your heart.
©Carol Desjarlais 4.5.23
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