I’m Calling You
I have been wanting to use more kinds of media in my work to give it more interest and texture. In this piece, I used liquid inks, pencils and oils.
I have decided to focus on getting better values in my paintings. Values (or tones) are the darks and lights in a painting. Not so much the colors, as their values. For instance, a highly saturated yellow can have a dark value in a painting.
I was dismayed when I first learned this about value. I love to use really bright colors. But doing that in the painting means that the painting won’t have much depth. If you don’t have much depth, you usually don’t have much of a painting.
So, what’s a girl like me to do? I have had to tone down my colors. I looked to the Impressionists. They have incredibly bright paintings, or so it would seem. However, many of them used greys in their paintings to make their other colors look bright.
Right now, in my paintings using grey is just not something I’m up for. So I started adding highly saturated colors that also contained a lot of white. That way, I can get better values going in my paintings.
I’ve been working with a new category of brushes in Painter, the app I use. They are called liquid inks. Painter has a category for regular inks, but liquid inks are a whole other thing.
Kerry C. Mitchell's Adventures 