11-01-2017, 03:40 PM
Hi Peter. Thought I'd offer some tips on the still life, in no particular order.
I'm guessing you're using Gouache here. First thing I would do is to take any kind of premixed black off your pallet. Premixed blacks are really difficult to use, and tend to muddy any colour your using. Basically a giant killjoy. You can mix chromatic blacks, which mix much better with other colours. An example would be Ultramarine blue and Burnt Sienna (I've found that this tends to a dark purple, where as with oils it tends to a warm, saturated, grey/black).
Remember that you can lower the value, and saturation, of a colour by adding it's complimentary. Red to green, blue to orange etc... If a blue it too strong, at a touch of orange. Too green? Chuck a little red at it.
Traditional paints aren't ever a pure, neutral hue. Your tubed paints will lean towards one of its adjacent on the colour wheel. That is, a yellow will lean slightly towards orange, or towards green. This means that if you're mixing greens using a warm yellow, and a warm blue, the red in those colours will act to neutralize the green, resulting in a slightly less saturated, duller mix. Thats probably poorly explained, but should hopefully put you on the right path.
Mixing a colour with white will also reduce the saturation. There are some high value, high saturation colours that you can't mix, and will need to buy tubed. An example would be magenta.
You may find it easier to kill the white of your page with a thin wash. This will make your value judgments much easier, and will let you add your light areas, rather than subtracting from them.
Colour doesn't exist by itself. The way a colour (and value) appears to the eye is influenced by the colour around it. A colour may might light or dark, depending on the colour next to it. Similarly, a colour may look warmer or cooler depending on it's surroundings. This becomes more obvious when painting reflections (the reflection of green grass on a red car)
If you're having difficulty seeing what a colour is, try isolating it. I often look at a colour through my fingers.
Pay close attention to how light bounces. The wall to the right of Jake isn't black, but actually has allot of reflected light on it. Similarly, the left side of Jake is being slightly lit by the light bouncing off Finn.
It look like there's a bit of sub surface scattering happening with the Jake figure. The shadow side of a solid yellow object probably wouldn't be so light or saturated.
The shadow side of an object tends to be more saturated, where the light side is less so.
Painting from photo reference is better than nothing, but cameras compress values and alter colours.
Gouache looks a little different when wet. Really pale colours will darken when dry, and dark colours will lighten when dry. Blues are particularly guilty of this.
Another issue specific to gouache is a difficulty achieving really dark, really saturated mixes. Whatever they add to make the paint opaque (presumably titanium?) makes your mixes slightly milky when compared to say, watercolour. Just something to be aware of.
I like to use a "wet pallet", to stop my paint drying out so quick. I lay my paints out on damp paper towel.
Hope this helps, good luck with your next attempt.
ps, you're killing it dude, keep going!
I'm guessing you're using Gouache here. First thing I would do is to take any kind of premixed black off your pallet. Premixed blacks are really difficult to use, and tend to muddy any colour your using. Basically a giant killjoy. You can mix chromatic blacks, which mix much better with other colours. An example would be Ultramarine blue and Burnt Sienna (I've found that this tends to a dark purple, where as with oils it tends to a warm, saturated, grey/black).
Remember that you can lower the value, and saturation, of a colour by adding it's complimentary. Red to green, blue to orange etc... If a blue it too strong, at a touch of orange. Too green? Chuck a little red at it.
Traditional paints aren't ever a pure, neutral hue. Your tubed paints will lean towards one of its adjacent on the colour wheel. That is, a yellow will lean slightly towards orange, or towards green. This means that if you're mixing greens using a warm yellow, and a warm blue, the red in those colours will act to neutralize the green, resulting in a slightly less saturated, duller mix. Thats probably poorly explained, but should hopefully put you on the right path.
Mixing a colour with white will also reduce the saturation. There are some high value, high saturation colours that you can't mix, and will need to buy tubed. An example would be magenta.
You may find it easier to kill the white of your page with a thin wash. This will make your value judgments much easier, and will let you add your light areas, rather than subtracting from them.
Colour doesn't exist by itself. The way a colour (and value) appears to the eye is influenced by the colour around it. A colour may might light or dark, depending on the colour next to it. Similarly, a colour may look warmer or cooler depending on it's surroundings. This becomes more obvious when painting reflections (the reflection of green grass on a red car)
If you're having difficulty seeing what a colour is, try isolating it. I often look at a colour through my fingers.
Pay close attention to how light bounces. The wall to the right of Jake isn't black, but actually has allot of reflected light on it. Similarly, the left side of Jake is being slightly lit by the light bouncing off Finn.
It look like there's a bit of sub surface scattering happening with the Jake figure. The shadow side of a solid yellow object probably wouldn't be so light or saturated.
The shadow side of an object tends to be more saturated, where the light side is less so.
Painting from photo reference is better than nothing, but cameras compress values and alter colours.
Gouache looks a little different when wet. Really pale colours will darken when dry, and dark colours will lighten when dry. Blues are particularly guilty of this.
Another issue specific to gouache is a difficulty achieving really dark, really saturated mixes. Whatever they add to make the paint opaque (presumably titanium?) makes your mixes slightly milky when compared to say, watercolour. Just something to be aware of.
I like to use a "wet pallet", to stop my paint drying out so quick. I lay my paints out on damp paper towel.
Hope this helps, good luck with your next attempt.
ps, you're killing it dude, keep going!