Esmeralda’s Project 4: Color-Palette – Atmospheric Landscape

We started this project by discovering major color properties like hue, value and saturation. Then we used color pencils, primary colors only (blue, red, and yellow) to create 3 color grids -all over color, warm hues, and cool hues. With the blending of those 3 colors we created more hues. Then, we started using acrylic paint. We did a monochrome palette, and a value gradation scale where we explored tints, shades and tones. Also, we explored simultaneous contrast using colored paper samples. We used dark and light colors as the background and middle colors as the control color which depending on its background feels like a different hue.

Knowing all this, we started looking images as a reference for our atmospheric landscape. Later, we created our thumbnails and picked a palette of complementary colors. I choose green and red, and created saturation and tint scales (digital) . With the help of the thumbnails and our scales we created the final painting, in my case using acrylic paint.

I did my first painting but I didn’t really show distance as my hues didn’t show saturation, value and contrast change. So I made a second one where my colors at in the distance were lighter and less saturated than the ones at the front. I used the complementary colors to desaturate the hues and white to make them lighter. Only thing I was confused is with my dark green. I used black to make it darker but in the painting we did not have to use black since we were exploring how complementary colors create those hues with different value and saturation. I wanted to try that, as the project is, but since I didn’t want to change my painting I showed the dark green colors I came up with (no black) next to my painting. Honestly, I struggle with this project in the painting phase because even though I did the discover part and researched about the major color concepts when doing my painting it was a little tricky putting into practice those concepts. However, I learned a lot about color and its attributes and I’m glad I got to do a second painting.