Saturday, February 27, 2021

The Neapolitan Lemon Sunset

This painting was an exploration of saturation costs, a concept expained by MacEvoy on his website Handprint.com. When a red and blue are mixed, you get a dark dull purple, closer to what ou may call lilac, or the colour of red wine. That is because red has a bit of yellow in it, which produced grey in the final product of the mixing. It is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact it can be used to great advantage to create colour harmony. In the sky, you see the red (PR209) with blue (PB15:3) separated, and in the very top right, mixed at full strength. You would hardly call that purple, it looks like printer ink. A slightly lighter version was used in the A-frame structure on the hillside, there you can see it is a mauve. The same trick was used for the foliage, I combined a high chroma yellow (PY184) with a dark blue (PB60) to produce some olive green colours, with hints of the pure yellow and blue added in for contrast. As the idea developed I threw in some yellow emoticon-people and a lemon sunset on the horizon. The sky reminded me of Neapolitan ice cream.

The Neapolitan Lemon Sunset 9 x 12" watercolour paper, watercolour, February 2021 (No. 2525b)

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