Caffeine 'n' Diesel
2019: 52 Weeks of Horsing Around!
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!
Then I had to figure out what to do with colour ....
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.
To decide the main colours, I decided to use coloured gesso's (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 gesso's. They were the bases for my paintings - yellow, red ochre, carmine (red), cerulean blue, navy blue, and violet.
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 gesso's, 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!
But then I had to come up with royalty-free horse images ... (this project was getting more complicated by the minute).
Thanks to Facebook, I was able to connect with three horse breeders who kindly gave me permission to use any of their photos as references. I also discovered a lady who photographed wild horses west of Sundre and she generously gave me access to her photos. And a call out on Facebook for horse photos completed this mission. Problem solved!
So, in a nutshell, here were the parameters for my 2019 Studio 52 project:
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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These were the two main tools for the year.
Dice - to help me decide the colours each week. On one dice, I wrote the names of the six Holbein gessos I'll be using: Red ochre, yellow, carmine (red), cerulean blue, navy blue, and violet.
Colour wheel - to help me explore colour relationships. I chose six relationships, all of which show which colours work well with each of the gessos. The colour relationships are: monochromatic, analogous, complimentary, split complimentary, triadic and tetradic. Each week, I'll show how the colour relationships work.
