Speaking of Art Blog

Red Dress, pastel, 11x14"

This is my newest pastel, of a brilliantly colored poppy fluttering its gorgeous red ruffled dress in the spring breeze.  I started it as a demo for my students who took an in-person O’Keeffe flowers pastel workshop from me at the Chesterton Art Center last weekend.  We really had fun developing our closeup flower paintings.

Before I left my house as I packed my supplies for the workshop, I carefully chose the colors I thought I’d use for my demo, and I placed them in my travel set of pastels in a special compartment.  But when I started working on my demo, I quickly realized something I had not anticipated.  It was that the color red can be deceiving.  I knew I wanted to keep my reds brilliant and super saturated in order to give it the impact it has in my reference photo.  But when I looked at my palette, I could find very few brilliant colors that I would call red.  Yes, I know that it’s important to use not only what I refer to as the mother color, the main local color of the flower, but also analogous colors to the mother color.  Analogous colors are the colors on either side of a color.  So with red, that would be red-violet and red-orange.  What I didn’t realize in advance is how few reds I have that I would consider brilliant, or super saturated.  I was forced fairly quickly to move into my analogous colors when I started rendering the petals.

Here is a little color chart I made later when I got home from the workshop, that has all the colors I used on all the petals.  The mother color is circled.  If I use too much of the mother color, the image and the petals will look flat.  Using analogous colors is vital when rendering flower petals, but that is evidently especially true when the mother color is red.  Look how few reds I have in the middle column of my color chart – 5, that’s it.  And I don’t even consider all of those to be red.  The top 2 are pink and the bottom one is more of a wine color.  So I was only left with 2 super saturated reds, and I had oodles of pastels to choose from.  There are a lot of muted reds out there, but I didn’t want to use those.  I only wanted knock-you-out red for my mother color, one shade that I used in the sunlit places and one for in the shadowed areas.  By combining those 2 with all the other analogous colors you see in my color chart, that is what made this poppy come to life.  In other words, there just aren’t very many brilliant reds out there that are different from each other.  That was the fact that surprised me as I worked on this piece.

While I finished my painting at home, I had a vague memory bubble up to the top in my brain.  Many years ago, I took a pastel workshop and the instructor was asking all of us to guess how to make a red rose look lusciously red.  We guessed and guessed, but all of our guesses were wrong.  Finally, the instructor told us the secret – don’t use very much bright, brilliant red.  Instead surround it with muted shades of red and/or brilliant shades of analogous colors to red.  Save that brilliant true red for only some key spots in the flower.  Aha, he was absolutely right, and I finally confirmed that while creating this red poppy.

The moral of the story with red?  Less is more.  What a beautiful, bewitching color it is.  It lets its analogous neighbors help it shine.  Very tricky.

This blog post is for artists who photograph their own artwork:  I've owned my newest Nikon camera for a little over 2 years now, and recently I was dissatisfied with how inaccurate my colors were in photos of my finished artwork.  I knew for sure it wasn't the camera's fault, so I decided to invest in a few new items and educate myself about how to manually adjust the color balance on my camera.  OH MY GOODNESS, with just a small cost but a heaping helping of reading and research, I am now getting colors that are spot on in every artwork photo.  It's absolutely amazing!

Here's what I invested in:  a photographer's gray card (they come in all different sizes), and the book, Nikon _______ (my camera's model number in the blank) for Dummies.  That's it!  Then I read up on adjusting the White Balance on my camera, and I messed around with it for a long time until I was able to take photos that match exactly with my artwork's colors.  Here's the really cool part:  I can now take pics of my artwork in different color lighting, and the colors in my photos will come out spot on every time!  Of course, I will still get the best results in bright lighting, but I no longer have to adjust the colors or their intensity ad nauseum with Photoshop afterwards.

I first take a pic of the gray card in the exact same lighting as my subject, and since the camera is preset to know where that gray color is supposed to land on the color wheel, it shifts everything in the photo to align with that color.  SLICK!  I knew my camera was way smarter than me.  I just needed to learn how to put it on the right settings to let it do its thing.

My first pic here is of the camera set on Auto with no flash.  While the colors of my wooden tulips are OK, the blue blinds in the background are off, too gray and drab looking.  The second pic is of my business card sized gray card that I propped up on top of the tulips so that I could take a pic of it in the exact same lighting as the tulips.  Third pic is with the camera now internally adjusted by the gray card image.  Look at that beautiful blue color in the background - SPOT ON.  I set my camera on A (aperture preferred) in order to be able to put my White Balance on Pre-set.  White Balance Pre-set is the setting my camera has to be on to make the proper adjustments internally.  Last pic is of my gray card laying on top of my new (treasured) book.  BTW, I bought both the gray card and the book on Amazon.  Together they ran me only about $26.  Best investment ever!  If you have a really good DSLR camera but don't know much about all its settings, then google your camera model along with "for dummies" and see if there's a whole book written just for operating your camera.  They are a great series, in my opinion.  They're written in plain understandable English for all of us everyday dummies out there.

And I don't have any idea why adjusting the color balance is called adjusting the white balance in photography lingo, but that's what you want to do, pre-set the white balance.  Once you do that, your colors will be spot on every...single...time.  So cool!