Color as a visual approach

This blog post is pulled mostly from Kevin Weckbach's book, "A Visual Palette." We are doing color this month and are now half way through. In the next post I will include my painting, which is in blues.

Picasso, blue period. Note that the blues are different.

Color as a visual approach promotes the theme of one color throughout a painting, in a way that emphasis's that color's unique range and diversity. For example, you take blue as your theme and create a visual statement based on an arrangement of various blues: bluish yellow (yes, it will look green), bluish grays, bluish blacks and pure blues. You might include cerulean blue, cobalt blue, thalo blue and or ultramarine blue. With each new blue, you define a new shape. This results in a painting that reads overall as blue, with an orchestration of seperate color statements lending depth and richness to the canvas.

Because of the diverse arrays of blues, this approach differs from that of color harmony., which typically unifies a painting's surface using one dominant color. In order to make color work as a visual approach, you will need to build it on a foundational value structure. A light and shadow or local tone can form as the underlying  framework for the color. When color dominates a painting's statement, the whole painting will first say blue to the viewer, before addressing the underlying visual structure, and it will do so not in one blue note but in a symphony of blues.

Quang Ho 20x20, Yellow Dancer

Above is a contemporary example of using the color yellow as a visual approach. Picasso's blue period is another good visual definition for examples of using blue.