Something Colorful

After several days of painting with a nearly black-and-white watercolor palette, I’ve done a complete about-face today to create a bright, colorful abstract painting. It’s really more of a watercolor exercise than an attempt at a finished composition. The idea was to use bright, bold swatches of basic colors — red, yellow, blue, green, orange, and violet — and simply fill up the paper. My personal goals were (a) not to end up with a page of mud, and (b) to make myself leave little white spaces both within the colors and at the edges.

I did not mix the secondary colors but used them from tubes of Daler-Rowney watercolors. For another practice session, I might repeat this exercise and do my own color mixing. For now, it was enough to just play with the colors.

In some areas, I let the colors merge and “bloom”. In other areas I kept the colors from bleeding together. It was fun to just play around with absolutely no preconceived notions of what I might be creating.

I’m calling this my “Crazy Quilt” of colors. I hope it brightens your day a bit.

I hope you’re having a bright and beautiful week!