Friday, February 22, 2008

Still Life with Three Oranges

This is the first of, or a study for, a possible series of still life paintings featuring oranges. I usually think more intuitively about colour; just using combinations which I like but after finishing this one it occured to me that it might fall into one of a number of classic colour schemes. Doing a little research I discovered that I had used a version of the "split complimentary" scheme. What this means is that instead of using two colours opposite each other on the colour wheel (in this case orange and blue), you use one colour and two colours on each side of its compliment. Without really thinking about it or planning (again, just because I happen to like these colours) I used orange (obviously for the oranges) and then violet (or purple, even though technically I think there is a subtle difference between the two) and Prussian Blue with is slightly to the green side of blue.
Even though as I say I didn't plan it out this way I did consciously use the blue-green toward the end as a contrast to the violet.
The painting is 9.5 x 12'' and available for $15o. Let me know.   

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I love this painting! The orange is so pure and true, it positively sings!

So glad you dropped by my blog and left a comment or I might not have found yours.

Bookmarking...:-)

Roderik Mayne said...

Thanks Christy. As I said I had to have my computer looked at and I am still having some problems, but I hopr to get back to posting soon.