These three paintings revolve around mastering colour and understanding how the colour wheel works.

The technical side of the roofscape drawing leaves much to be desired as the perspective is skwonk, but the colour aspect was the object of this exercise and that was successful…. I suspect some drawing lessons will definitely be required if I am to start drawing a prolific amount of buildings in the near future!
The 1st exercise (the roofscape) and 2nd exercise (the lemons) were the start of 3 simple studies which helped me to put into practice what I’ve learnt using only complimentary colours (this describes colours that are positioned opposite each other on the colour wheel. ) The complement of red is green, blue is orange, and yellow is purple. The idea was to create the paintings in order to help build my confidence with colour mixing and to see what can be achieved by using only a a very limited number of colours.

Roofscape – unfortunately there are no extra views of this as I gave it away before I could photograph it properly!

Acrylic on canvas panel
30 X 20 cm

Colours used:
• Cadmium orange
• Burnt sienna
• Titanium white
• Phthalo blue (red shade)
• Coloured ground mix (Raw umber & White) – base colour painted onto my white canvas

Lemons
Acrylic on canvas panel
20 X 30 cm

The lemons used only two colours (listed below and white).
• Cadmium yellow light
• Cobalt violet hue
• Titanium white
• Coloured ground mix (Raw umber & White) – base colour painted onto my white canvas

The 3rd exercise (blue jug with spring onions) uses split compliments which I found a lot more challenging to master. The process seemed almost counter intuitive but once I was able to get my head around how to use the colours I started understanding how the concept worked.

Split complementary colour schemes are formed from finding the complements – like red for example – then choosing the colours on either side of the complement (which is green) – this would then be blue-green and yellow-green illustrated in the above colour wheel.

Blue jug with spring onions
Acrylic on canvas panel
20 X 30 cm

Colours used:
• Titanium white
• Cadmium yellow light
• Raw sienna
• Cadmium red medium
• Phthalo blue green shade
• Mars black or Ivory black
• Coloured ground mix (Raw umber & White) – base colour painted onto my white canvas