I am a landscape painter juxtaposing color in pastel to create the illusion of light.

I have a confession I like to play a game on my iPad called Blendoko,  I am hooked and fascinated by the harmony of the color scales that are presented to solve.  As I solve the scales  I often find interesting color harmonies that I am inspired by and would have never considered. As you can see I'm on the simple level.

This color scale caught my eye and I kept going back to it. I really don’t know why I liked this particular one, but I took a photo of it and took it up to the studio to study. With my color wheel I realized I was looking at a cool analogous color harmony of red-violet, violet, blue-violet, blue, blue-green. But they were also in a subdued value structure.

I decided to set myself up a creative problem to solve, and ask myself WHAT IF I painted something using this color harmony?

First I needed an idea. 

My idea involved the large foreground tree with distance. The dominant color of my cool analogous color harmony is Red-Violet using a value structure that is medium, I recommend that you always have a hierarchy among the color harmony you paint with this avoids the problem of sameness in art. Everything is more interesting using a hierarchy.

This is the painting I ended up with for my self-imposed challenge.

Stillness 1 16x20 pastel

My next challenge was to ask myself WHAT IF I use the same cool analogous color harmony, limit my value structure a little more towards the darker side of the value scale, and make the blue green dominant? This is the painting I ended up with for the challenge. 

Stillness 2 12x16 Pastel

Each painting reads differently and each one tells a different story. Though I slightly changed parts of the paintings, the overall composition remains the same, using the same color harmony for each but with a different hierarchy and value structure.

The challenge took me three days to complete and overall, I am happy with my results.

Exercises like this helps to strengthen your ability to command and control your color. It takes an understanding of Hierarchy, Color Harmony, and Value Structure to make a beautiful painting.

I invite everyone to take the challenge and paint, post your results to Facebook or Instagram.

1. Pick a color harmony, pick a hierarchy, decide on a value structure.

2. Use the same color harmony, choose a different hierarchy, choose a different value structure.

Remember to use the same composition. 

Now onto the next challenge!?