Caffeine 'n' Diesel

I am so very excited to announce my 2019 Studio 52 project!!

52 Weeks of Horsing Around!

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Why "horsing around"?? I knew this project was going to be colourful but didn't have a theme or know how to make it sound more catchy than 52 Weeks of Playing With Colour (which sounded bleh to me!). Thanks to a thesaurus, I found that another way to say "playing" was to say "horsing around" - and just like that, I had a name and a theme!

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Then I had to figure out what to do with colour ....

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Are you familiar with a colour wheel? It's an artist tool that looks like a circular rainbow, with the primary colours (red, yellow, blue) and colours in between them that are mixes that those three colours make. An integral part of the colour wheel is the relationships that the colours around it have with each other, depending on where they are situated from the main colour. I chose six colour relationships to explore: monochromatic, analogous, triadic, tetradic, complimentary, and split complimentary.

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To decide the main colours, I decided to use coloured gessos (sort of like a painter's primer, but for artists). I'd gone to a workshop last year put on by the Holbein company, and fell in love with their thick, creamy, colourful gessos, and I have six colours that I decided to use as my bases for my paintings. Those gessos are: yellow, red ochre, carmine (red), cerulean blue, navy blue, and violet.

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But how to coordinate all of this??

 

Big purple Dollar Store dice! On one dice, I wrote the six colour relationships, one per side. On the other, I wrote the six coloured gessos, one per side. Then, I tossed each of them 52 times and wrote them on my master project plan in the order they were tossed. Colour plan completed!

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But then I had to come up with royalty-free horse images ... (this project was getting more complicated by the minute, lol).

 

Thanks to Facebook, I was able to connect with three horse breeders who have kindly given me permission to use any of their photos as references. I also discovered a lady who documents wild horses west of Sundre who also was generous enough to give me permission to use any of her photos! And, ... my daughter-in-law manages a stable which gives me more people to ask for photos! Problem solved! (That being said, I'm building a file of possible reference photos, and if you are reading this and have some pictures you'd like to offer up, I'd be so grateful!)

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So, in a nutshell, here are the parameters for my 2019 Studio 52 project:

52 Weeks of Horsing Around!

1. Follow the master plan for each week's main colour and colour relationship.
2. Paint the reference photo following that plan.
3. Find an applicable short quote that describes the painting.
4. Post a new painting every Monday.

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It's going to take at least a few weeks to get caught up here because January was so busy with our Studio 52 show, but I hope to be on track by the end of February.

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To see progress pictures of the paintings and how I chose colours each week, please visit my Facebook pages @Studio52Project or @caffeinendiesel.  Thanks so much for following this new project, and I hope you enjoy it!