Art journal prompt: Color Background

The Day 4 creative prompt was Color Background. Wendy suggested choosing a color you don’t typically use and I thought that sounded like a cool challenge. I mixed up a mid-value red-violet, a color I have pretty much no love for. And the fun part came with choosing the colors to use on top of it. I’ve been itching to use an earthy yellow ochre, so went with a triadic color scheme and rounded it out with blue-green.

Triadic color scheme and compositional sketch

With the color palette and a basic composition as a starting point, I layered on more and more acrylic paints. It really pushed the poor paper to its limits! But it didn’t actually break through to the other side, luckily. Right now I’m obsessed with the idea of putting warm and cool colors of the same value next to each other — something I’m learning about in my landscape painting study. So I like where the mid-value blue-green, ochre, and grey meet in different places.

I applied a lot of the paint with my fingers, which made me feel more connected to the page. It’s something I’d like to do more of.