This painting was an experiment. I’ve been trying to learn different tips from different artists. One artist said she doesn’t like to adhere to the rule of 3rds, which got me curious about what that was…
So briefly what it is to my non-technical mind is dividing your canvas up into thirds and choosing the points of intersection for your focal points. Many of you probably already know all about this, but I didn’t. So in my little painting I put the yellow ranunculus in the upper left focal point…
But that is not all… then I watched a video about using the color wheel in your paintings. According to the artist the background color should be the opposite color on the wheel of your focal point color…
My ranunculus in the focal point was a yellow ochre color and the complimentary color of that was purple. He also said to use the horizontal colors around the focal color, which would be green and red. So I did that and I thought the purple background was way overboard, so I toned it down with gray.
I don’t know what I learned from this, but I think I’m up for more experimenting…
Simply Painting 