December 7, 2023
Now that the weather in Central Pennsylvania has turned to winter and we are in the darkest part of the year, working in my studio becomes less appealing. I rely a lot on natural light, but more importantly, the little wall heater in my poorly insulated attic studio just cannot keep up when temperatures drop below 40 degrees.
After the holidays, I plan to set up a small table in my daughter’s bedroom for painting with gouache and watercolor. But until then, it is very tempting to spend my studio time by the fire in the living room reading art books. And I am not apologizing for it! Reading art books is a valid studio activity and a key part of my “gathering” season.
Last winter I completed a variety of composition studies in my painter’s sketchbook: colored pencil thumbnails, collage value studies with black, white and grey paper, and collage with paper painted in colors I mixed.
This week I completed a variation on these studies. After I have finished reading fashion magazines, I will go through and pull out pages with color palettes I love. I will cut these out, put them in my sketchbook and then try to mix the colors. I will also pull out pages with individual colors I love. I then cut the colors out and use them to build my own color palettes. I use the shapes in a collage.
Each collage gets it’s own page in my sketchbook, so that I can try to match each color through color mixing, and save the palette as inspiration for a painting.
You can see I am leaning heavily towards greens and blues lately, and also yellow ochre is the secret mvp.
How are you feeling about your studio time this month? What are your expectations of your work right now? Are these expectations reasonable?
Choose a triadic color scheme. Paint freely with those hues and their tones.
I am still doing a little holiday shopping for myself. What are your favorite art books? Please share in the comments!