Analogous colors are easy. The minute I saw the picture, I wanted to weave in mostly oranges, plenty of yellows, murky dirty greens, perhaps a hint of brown or black, with a little bit of teals as highlights. I wasn't sure how else I was going to make it interesting.
While making the warp, I wanted to mix purples because I had only one brash orange and wanted to tone it down, make the warp more interesting, and make the overall value darker.
I like the warp well enough, but I wanted to tone down the orange.
Had I a couple of browns, things might have gone smoothly. But I didn't. So, without thinking, my body automatically added some darker analogous stuff, and dilute the orange. It's not ugly, but it looks like two bits of analogous gradation with a smidgen of contrast squeezed in, and visually so not what I had wanted to do for this project.
I know these things are natural progression of projects/processes, and as long as I'm playing everything by ear, it was bound to happen.At one point in the afternoon my weaving became "automatic", selecting analogous wefts and creating a weft-wise gradation as well. My body was home, but my psyche was back in Paraparaumu, October 2006, in Randy Darwall's workshop, desperately trying to make "painterly" color transitions. Randy doesn't advocate just analogous, but that was the easiest painterly/watercolor/wash transition I could think of. And it's so not what I had in mind for this project. I took out some picks. Not a lot, but a few.
What I want for this project, at this point, are blotches of squares/pixels, in different sizes, in relative but not complete harmony. A tiny version of a vibrant, tantalizing modern geometric painting. Something like that...
PS: I've about 10cm woven - 140cm to go.
5 comments:
Meg, the warp you've chosen is vibrant and gorgeous. I can't imagine what more you would want (of course I have zero training in color theory beyond sort of reading a couple of very good books). If you are weaving 'by ear' and the weft is looking as full and alive as the warp, then you are succeeding in making a thing of beauty. I say, keep going and see what it turns into. I hope one day to be able to set a warp in gorgeous, jeweled tones like the ones you have chosen. You really are an artist. Revel, girl, revel!
:)
Sunny
Thank you so much, Sunny. I think I'm still stuck with what I was going for, (the more sedate), and so there is a bit of a pull towards reining in the unruly warp, and then there is the very new and strange "see where it takes me" pull, which has been winning for once.
We'll see how it goes. I have tons of black clothes, (I am in New Zealand, after all,) so either way, the piece will stand out from the rest of my attire.
Meg, I was wondering if you have taken a lot of classes in color theory or of your sensitivity to colors has been a part of your cultural experinces or just personal experiences and taste? You seem to have a more heightened experience to color than most artists I know. I'm wondering if I have missed something about color all these years?
Steve is partially color blind. I'm convinced he simply sees color differently than I do, that red is not what I see as red, but something unique to him. It has made me wonder if we all have a unique view of color. if so, then yours is highly developed I think.
I've only had one short course on color, Dana. I don't now if it's cultural, or just my Mom and her influence, or just me. By the way, the men-folk in my mother's family were all very acutely color-blind, so much so some never got driver's license, or so I was told.
Aha! Same photo repeated so soon!!
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