Blue and Orange

Gold Trees Orange Shadows.  Watercolor.  6.5 x 11 inches.

For the better part of the last week, I've been limiting my palette to blues and oranges.  I don't know why.  I do like blue, but this time of year (fall) I tend to think more in warm colors, and my recent paintings have tended to turn up disproportionately blue.  It may be my suspicsion that it's going to be a miserable winter.  It's noon on Oct. 4, and it's only just over 40 degrees F.  Jeez.

Work in Progress.  Watercolor and Crayon.
Approximately 15 x 11 inches.

One of the frustrating things with blue, is getting the painting to reproduce correctly on screen, but I think I finally figured it out. For that I have to thank this primer on using Adobe Photoshop, which I adopted for use in pixlr.  (If you're looking for a free web based photo editing program, pixlr is great.  You can see a write up on a bunch of various freeware from lifehacker here.)

All the paintings contain phthalo blue and ultramarine blue (a cool and warm blue, so to speak). In some there's also prussian blue.  All have cadmium orange light, which makes gorgeous grays when mixed with the blues.  The uppermost dark blue line in the top left corner is bothering me.  If I can get that to integrate in somehow, I think I'll be finished with the painting.  I'm open to advice.The unfinished abstract on the right contains indigo plus some crayon, and the trees above also have indian yellow.  All the paint is is from Daniel Smith, and I've been painting on Kilimanjaro 300 lb cold press paper from Cheap Joes.

Finally, here's a collection of paintings I posted on Facebook earlier in the week--I put these up before I figured out how to correct the color levels.

Post by Amy Bryce Watercolors.