Sunday, May 17, 2015

Imperial Chinese Horse I-V - Five Works in Progress

Today is the second day of a workshop in abstracts with Melanie Browne at KAGS. I thoroughly enjoyed the first day doing the sketch (see yesterday's post) for the image I was going to use for the series of small paintings.













Imperial Chinese Horse I

For the first canvas I drew the sculpture fairly realistic and have lines for the background to show movement and to ground the horse.














Imperial Chinese Horse II

For the second canvas I drew a more stylized horse, concentrating more on the negative space, which will be filled with colour.














Imperial Chinese Horse III

For the third canvas I used more of the geometric shapes found within the horse sculpture. It will be interesting to see what colours I finally decide to use for both the horse and the background.













Imperial Chinese Horse IV

On the fourth canvas I exploded the shapes of the horse using squares and rectangles and it will be on a pale coloured background for a strong contrast.













Imperial Chinese Horse V

On the first canvas which is similar to the fourth canvas in that the horse shapes are exploded but the background is also made of geometric shapes.

I used a limited palette of black, French ultramarine blue, Grumbacher Red (Naphthol red AS-D), Hansa yellow and Titanium white.

I started by mixing my background colours making the various mauves of blue and red with touches of white and black, then the greens of blue, yellow adding white and a tiny amount of black. These colours were used throughout the painting creating an interesting pattern.

In a few areas I used pure French ultramarine blue as well as mixing white and a small amount of black or red for variation.

Next I added a little more yellow into the green and a lot of white for a pale yellow green and painted in the mane and tail as well as a few areas to create movement throughout the painting.

I under painted the horse shapes with a mix of black and red for a warm colour, then to lighten I added yellow and a bit of blue and went over them leaving a few areas of the black mix to show.

It still needs a little more work before it is completed and I will post each of these paintings at a later date as more work on them is completed.

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