2/24/07

White on White with Hoisin Sauce

This is a small watercolor painting done as a quick demo in one of this week's classes. I set up a rather busy still life (very edited here) of white objects with one dark object in the forefront. The challenge was to show the white objects as white, but to balance the values in the painting to make the darker bottle of hoisin sauce fit in without being the only object that we notice in the painting. I wish I had photo shop so I could take out the red background and try some other colors and values. I think maybe putting that red background in was too obvious a balance. Maybe I should have matched the value, but not the color.

My students did a great job with this. At first they were a little frustrated, and they fussed and sputtered, but then they turned out some really good paintings - very individual and personal styles.







3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Catherine,
I think I like the background. There are a lot of cool colors in the objects so I like the contrast of the warm red. Maybe you could have used a warm yellow with some red in it. Anyway it's a nice little painting. I check your blog often and get excited when you put something new on it.

Ginny B.

Anonymous said...

Oops, just took another look at the painting and see you used the warm yellow on the edge of the pitcher so now I'm thinking just stick with the red. I like it.
Ginny

Linda said...

Great study -- I really like the idea of putting a dark object in front for balance. And I like the background, too.
:-)