Four Planets, Planet One.
Four Planets, Planet One
Most views as with pigments and paint in most art, has a lot of white in it. Take the moon, for example, on it's surface, the photographs indicate a sort of gray-green landscape. But from Earth, it looks really white in certain places. That's because the surface is bumpy with mountains and ridges and the appear white at a distance. The light on most surfaces is reflected back as lots of white with the colors mixed in.
When oil paint comes out of the tube, or when it's mixed with oil from a pigment powder, it's really dark as a sort of pure color. That's why lots of white is used. The most common whites are made with titanium, zinc and lead. The lead white has what we call good covering power, but it's poisonous. The artist has to handle it with care and it's not too good to be using it really a lot as somewhere along the line you get some on your skin or forget to wash up or whathaveyou. That's why the other two types are safer to use. I even got some prepared blue icing from the grocery store for Jen's birthday cake that had titanium white in it to lighten the color.
But in the work contrasts are important. Notice the dark red. That's a lovely color called alizarin crimson. It looks like the blue next to it is cerulean blue and the violets are a combination of the cerulean blue with the alizarin crimson and maybe zinc white. These are put on in the impasto technique with a hogs hair "bright" or short rectangular flat brush. It looks like I alternated between a four to a two.
Notice how your mind uses the picture to actually compose a scene for you in your subconscious. The uplifting aspect to this is, among other things, that the colors and the way they're arranged in a form of landscape frame of reference, help to activate the parts of your mind needed for an optimum level of mental capabilities. Even though this is a digital picture of a painting, with color interpretation done by the camera imaging and then translated to pixels on the monitor with further interpretation in the html and the rgb factors of the browser, you still see quite a bit of the visual value of the original artwork. It still conveys to you the message of the pigment of the original.
Click here to return to the Four Planets page.
Click here to return to Voice Introduction for Oil Paintings, Page Five.
Click here to return to the 4-Planets-1 digital artwork projects page.