• Special message -- Put Sunday, October 15, 2 pm Eastern on your calendar for our next live chat on YouTube. We will be exploring how to simplify shapes without losing their character. Fun
stuff! Composing tools are like a car's engine. Individual parts do important things, but the engine works best when all those parts are working together. Nature works like that, too! A set of tools called Varying and Repeating can make our compositions purr or can destroy them. Think about it--constant repeating without any variation can drive us mad, yet just the right
amount of repeating keeps things working together, especially if there is some variation within the repeat. It's true in life, in music and most especially in our paintings. REPEATING AND VARYING COLOR All our visual elements can be repeated within a composition just as they can be varied. But color does more than any of the others to express the entire meaning within a composition. Within it we can
vary and repeat its hue, its saturation and its value, either separately or all together. Basuki Abdullah's Moon Light Sonata repeats blue everywhere, but some blues are more saturated than others (variation), some are darker than others (more variation) and some lean towards violet (becoming violet towards the bottom) while others
lean a bit towards green (still, more variation). Scanning through the variations, here are ones I found. If he had varied only the value of a single blue, the painting would lose its intrigue and becomes a bit tiresome. If he had gone a bit more extreme on his hue variation, it might go more psycodelic. If he had really gone crazy with it and expanded more into the violets with no variation in the saturation, we might have something like this. Sorta blinds you, doesn't it. Take a trip over to UK artist David Curtis website, click on his Gallery, then Marine in the menu, and look at all the ways he repeats and varies colorl Enjoy a fabulous weekend!
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Happy Painting,
Dianne
dianne@diannemize.com
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During my Language of Painting series, I explained the role of our visual elements. If you'd like to review those roles to better understand the behavior of elements, here are the links to each of those
discussions: Color --Value -- Shape -- Texture -- Size -- Line and Direction
You can access the archive of all my newsletters (as well as the Quick Tips and other stuff) at any time by going HERE.
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