FCA Workshop on Composition and Colour

  This is day 2 of the FCA Calgary Chapter workshop with Alice Helwig. In this lesson, we took a magazine picture with colours we liked and then had to colour match it on the side and paint a small painting of our photo resource (left-magazine picture on upper right of easel). We then took that as a reference (photo on right) to paint a a larger painting using those colours (my new colour reference on the left top corner of my easel, photo reference underneath and painting on the right.

 This is Alice's photo that we used for the next exercise. We took a black and white copy, traced the large shapes and then painted it on water colour paper with black and white oil paint.

After that dried, we painted over the large shapes with 2 colours of grey (light and dark) keeping some white and black areas.  Once that dried, we went back over it with colours to make sure the values stayed correct. 

I used wild "unreal" colours to see if I could make them tonally correct.


This is the photo of the above painting taken on my camera in black and white showing me that I did get the values right.

FCA Calgary Chapter workshop with Alice Helwig

I attended a FCA Calgary Chapter workshop last Saturday and Sunday with Alice Helwig teaching about values and colour schemes. I really found the value part of the weekend really seemed to finally hit home for me. I can't do the "squinty eye" thing that everyone else seems to be able to do to see values and not details. My camera could do that for me as I found out. Using acrylic was a challenge as well but I learned more about using it therefore enjoyed it more.

 This exercise was to put different colours of the
same value. This is something I could never see until I viewed it on my camera in black & white. You can see where I painted a couple of brush marks in a darker value.




 This is the same exercise again using different colours and using white in the mix. The black and white study shows they are all a similar value.






These are photos of my palette as I am mixing, trying to get the same values with this wide range of colours.