Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Complementary, my dear Watson ...


Evensong ©2009 Karen Mathison Schmidt
6 x 6 • acrylic on Gessobord

SOLD • private collection, Salt Lake City, Utah

This is an offshoot of a small bayou which runs through the field a little way down the road from us. It doesn’t have an official name; I call it Cornfield Bayou. (You can see the edge of the corn crop running across the horizon line in the right 2/3 thirds of the painting.) This is my favorite part of the day in the summertime: that slow stretching out of the afternoon into evening, when the light just lingers and lingers.

Only one work-in-progress photo on this ... I just dove in and painted it from beginning to end without stopping.

Then after I scanned the finished painting, I decided I wanted to make the sky a little warmer, a little more to the green side of blue, rather than the purple side. I thought that would give the painting more harmony, in keeping with the red/green palette I had chosen for the subject (no true blues, no true yellows).
I also made a few of the red highlights a truer red rather than an orange-y red. Here on the left you can see the painting before I made those final changes, and the finished, final, final version on the right.

I really think this final version has a more harmonious, cohesive color scheme.

And here are some close-up details:




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