Give up? It's a black and white photograph of an abstract painting! :) (perhaps a poor riddle, I realize!) My instructor said there is a reason why a painting would be reproduced in black and white. It is for the viewer, perhaps a student such as myself, to be able to see the balance and rhythm of it all without being influenced by color used. Of course that made sense!
And as I had my camera on me, I excitedly decided to give it a try. For the first time in this way, I used my camera as a tool. I set the setting to black and white so that when I looked through its lens the colors within a painting were no longer. As a result I found I was no longer influenced by the color I had chosen and found instead a surprising amount of neutral, unexciting, undramatic gray.......
Here are a couple of paintings and what happened along the way in class #6:
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| I was surprised to see how grey/neutral this was without color!! What I thought was bold and drama really wasn't working, at least not for me..... and so I decided to shake things up a bit...... |
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| It didn't take long before I had created some dramatic darks and lights. The grayness was disappearing...... |
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| This is the end of my work with this piece for today. Definitely a step in the right direction, I think. I'm curious to see it in color (which I imagine sounds strange as you would think I would be noticing the color as I'm actually painting with color and not with black and white. But now I am really able to use color to create depth (in values of gray through my camera's lens) in a very different way than before!) |
Here's another:
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| This is the painting referenced in my post about class #5...... |
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| and the magic beings, layer by layer..... |
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| I had no idea the variety of shades of gray I could achieve through the use of color! |
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| And so the fun continues..... |
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| layer by layer, value by value, a push and a pull |
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| by large and small, papa bear, mama bear, and baby..... |
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inviting the eye to come and stay for (a long) while......
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Stay tuned! I look forward to sharing what I learn next :)
