Atmospheric Perspective contd

The perspective looks good with the layered, painted silk gauze.

Too bad the mountain looks bad.

Version 1.0 -  tried to improve it by adding some cat fuzz for clouds...

Version 2.0 - covered it up with gray gauze...

Next attempt is to add something to give the mountain some scale. Unfortunately there's a limit to how much I can modify at this point... Oh dear!

Atmospheric perspective

As usual I'm going to stitch my piece before finishing writing the paper on perspective - although this time all the research were done.
This is the test piece - the initial painting using water color.

Test piece partially stitched. I tried several different techniques on the left mountain, and used layered silk gauze for the green hills.

The next one should be the start of the real piece - if I don't mess it up part way. I tried to warm up the foreground green with an orange under painting. Unfortunately it shows too much under the green silk gauze, so I painted another layer of organza to put under the green. Will see what it looks like when I stitch it up...

As for the red apple (the "What is it" piece), there were a couple of misinterpretations. Firstly, the "all shadows are blue" declaration was incorrect (what?! Even Farber Birren said so!) The missing word was "inherently" blue. That is because sunlight - the common source of light - is yellow-orange, and the shadow is then the complementary of the incident light; hence blue-violet. Secondly and that was my error - the reflected light is the complement of the red, and I added green. My mistake stemmed from the difference between paint and thread; adding green paint to red makes brown, which becomes the reflected shadow. Instead of adding green thread to the red thread, I should have used brown thread instead. I'm glad I got that straightened out - it's easy to test it using a plain round Christmas ornament under different light resting on different colored papers.

What is it

It's getting to be time to work on my Master Craftsman on Color, Step 4 submission. This step is on Perspective, Shading and Shadows. So here is an attempt to depict shadows and highlights.

This is not finished, and DH thought it was some sort of Tai Chi symbol. Oh well, this is what it was supposed to be; and from 6 feet away it doesn't look half bad!

I drew it with color pencils and then matched the pencils with the floss color.



Not a success, but did show possibilities, and I discovered some "new" techniques. The darker part of the apple shows surprising movement - not intentional but may be a useful application for the future. For the yellow highlights, I deliberately "distressed" the floss by untwisting it to make it finer.

While doing research for representing shadows, I read from one author that all shadows are blue, and then from another artist (and also from my art teacher Suzy) that shadows show the complementary of the local color. Also shadows have soft edges (unless cast in very harsh bright light).
This is an attempt to 1) add the complementary color (green) to the shadow, 2) depict the soft edges, and 3) to show the (light green) reflected light back onto the apple. Compare the following to the first photo, where the shadow does not have green. I haven't decided which one is better.

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