I'm doing a series of abstract images to help reinforce the basic concepts and tools in art.  It's mostly in an effort to improve how I look at composition, but this will also get me thinking about line, shape, area, perspective, depth, etc in their most basic forms.  Here I started in black and white, but next I will try to do the same compositions using color to see how the colors affect the image.

So far I have 9 compositions.

Here are some close-ups…

I did this one mostly absent mindedly.  I didn't have any goals or intentions with it, I just got in there and let my hands do the walking.  It was an entirely right brained experience.  I had to stop myself before I ruined it with too much detail.  I knew I should step back from it for a bit and come at it with fresh eyes to fix any major errors before going on.  So here is where I stopped at.

"Oh, he's So CUTE!"

I can see so many mistakes on this guy right now that it makes me squirm in my seat.  But I gotta call it a night, so I'm posting him now.  I had a lot of fun with this little guy. 

Okay, okay, so I slipped back into value mode tonight.  But I needed to in order to first think about composition.  I'd like to do a full environment piece in the future and I always wanted to do a spooky Castle Dracula location.  Pretty generic, yes.  But I'd like to start here and work it into something more unique.  I'm going to have to do some reseach for this one.  It's going to be fun.

The interesting thing was, already after just a week of doing these color sketches, I was already thinking of color as I worked on this piece.

Woops, I just noticed that I forgot to add a shadow. Just pretend that he's grounded and not floating in mid-air for the time being.

This one was tricky because there is an overall red-violet atmosphere to the image. So I had to adjust the colors of his suit to make him feel like he's actually in that environment. Hopefully I succeeded to some degree.

Another quick color doodle.

I really want to continue working on this guy. There is so much fun waiting to be had in the rendering of the fur, the texture of the nose and inner ears. And the background is full of possibilities. But for now I am just going to stick to focusing on color. This one was simple bright happy colors.

Color Doodle #5

Its amazing how far you can push a color and it'll still feel right.  Colors are so interdependant upon the colors around them.  The color I started with for her skin tone was more like the hue around that hotspot on her shoulder.  I kept pushing it darker and darker to define the shapes and shadows as well as pumping an incredible amount of red into it.  I had to add in the red to make her blonde hair pop out more.

More playing with color. This time I tried to go with a color palette on the complete opposite side of the spectrum than what you would first associate with this subject. Plus I didn't want to use the same color cues that we are comfortable with, so I made the sky green, the leaves blue, the ground almost black, etc. I like where its going, but I think it could be punched up a bit more. Maybe I just need to be more bold with my colors. I think I'll probably come back to this one.