Painting Moon Snails in a Limited Palette

On the sixth day, God created the artist, realizing no doubt that He had far from exhausted
the uses of color.
                                                                                                     ~ Robert Brault

Moon Snails with Coral - 5" x 7" oil on canvas

I've mentioned a few times over the years that I really enjoy working with limited palettes. Certainly I am often tempted to augment my colors when I see all the gorgeous paint choices at the art supply store, but I've managed to keep my palette hovering around 6 colors plus white for a while now. Generally I use a warm and a cool red, a warm and a cool yellow, and a warm and a cool blue to mix all the rest of my colors from. I've found that this method gives me nice color harmony in my work, with the added advantage of not having to dig through piles of tubes of paint trying to find a specialty color. I suppose I could also say I'm lazy in that with fewer colors, I don't have to remember as many combinations of which colors play nicely when mixed together and which tend to make mud.

Blocking in the shapes and values.

In this painting I only used 3 colors plus white to mix all my other colors from: alizarin crimson, winsor yellow, and ultramarine blue. This is certainly not a painting with a lot of flashy color; it's much more low chroma, but I like the subtlety. I plan on painting this set-up a few times, playing with different combinations of primaries to see how they affect the mood of the scene.

Detail from painting

Moon snails (a carnivorous gastropod with a craving for clams) are found around the world, but the particular species in my painting live along the Atlantic coast. These two shells are from wintertime visits to the New Jersey coast with dear friends of ours. We love beachcombing in winter. The heat and the throngs of people are gone, leaving us a wild and beautiful expanse of sand to explore.

More Shell Paintings

"To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow..."
                                                                                                              ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Conch shell - oil 5" x 7"

Shells with ink bottle - oil 7" x 5"

My first post and first paintings for 2015. The shells are all from my father-in-law's collection, and the lovely antique ink bottle was a gift from a dear college friend. I just love that color blue.

Happy belated New Year, everyone!

More Etching And A Little Woodblock Printing

"The true method of knowledge is experiment."
                                                 ~ William Blake

I think the worst thing about going away is when you come back and settle into your old life it's as if you never left. Except for all the unpacking we've yet to get through, being home is making me feel like this summer in Philadelphia never happened. Luckily, I've got all the new knowledge and artwork to prove to myself that it did happen.

During the last two weeks of my printmaking class at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, we worked independently on whichever printmaking methods we wanted. I knew I wanted to experiment more with etching, particularly the inking process to see what different effects I could get. I played with multiple colors of ink and on some of the prints I took a Q-Tip and wiped away the ink in certain areas to try to get a highlight effect on the shells.

 

We also worked with woodblock printing, which I liked very much. I had assumed that carving into wood would be harder than carving into a linoleum block, but I was surprised at how easily it carved. I was also intrigued by the idea of brushing the wood with a wire brush to bring out and print the wood grain along with the carved image.

This barred owl image was a lot of fun to carve. I then inked the block with two different colors - black on the owl and a very dark blue on the sky. As you can see, the inks ended up looking pretty much the same. Overall though, I felt this woodblock print was successful enough to whet my interest in more experimenting at home.

Back in the Spring, I had hinted that there were multiple big adventures coming up for me. My time at PAFA this summer was just the start. Things are about to get really busy around here...