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…
Sweet!
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Thanks, Sheila… I’m not sure what I think of all this…
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I love your last line here…I’m sure you learned SOMETHING! 😉😊😄
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Frustration??? 😉
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I knew about the Rule of Thirds, but not about the background and adjacent colors thing – I too will need to experiment. Thanks for something to think about 🙂
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You’re welcome. I’m glad that I’m not the only one that hasn’t heard of these things. 🙂 The funny thing is the first artist didn’t really like the rule of thirds and that is what headed me in that direction.
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I don’t understand what you mean by horizontal colors in the color wheel, can you explain?
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Hi Eileen, My thought process here definitely is confusing, but honestly I have such a hard time grasping all these color wheel technicalities that it is no wonder that I have a hard time explaining. By horizontal, what I should have stated is if you place your focal color and complimentary color in a vertical line, the colors that show up horizontally to them would be the ones you would use. Hope this clarifies. As a side note… I didn’t like this painting and ended up scraping it to make another one called Finicky Flowers https://30daystopaintinspiration.wordpress.com/2016/09/12/day-12-finicky-flowers/
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Thank you for the clarification.
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You’re welcome. 🙂
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