Study in Gray

Study in Gray

Want to give yourself something challenging to do on a Sunday? Paint all white objects without using any black! It’s fun, but not always easy. And even though you may loose your way, you will come out on the other side. Or that’s the hope anyway.

Study in Gray
Watercolor on Paper
4 x 7″
$75
Purchase

I do give myself this exercise every once and awhile in oils- painting all white objects with primary colors. It is a kind of mental gymnastics and makes me stop and have to think, reevaluate and compare values over and over again throughout the process.

I cannot remember if I have done this in watercolor and certainly not any time recently, so I thought to give it a try.

Now, you might be saying to yourself, “what is that lump of stuff in the little dish?”, yes, I know because I said that very same thing to myself, but I let it go and tried to just focus on the painting.

I did a little warm up to prepare for this. I took some colors in my watercolor palette and made a few samples of grays and wrote how I made them.

I noticed that I go for the same color mixtures over and over again and so I thought to try some different ones to see what I could come up with. What I came up with was mostly variations on purple. This tells me that maybe I could change out 1 or 2 colors in my palette choice to provide some other possible variations.

Since I realized that I am getting so many purple grays, I worked to make some more yellow colors in the plate and around to compliment that purple- working with what I had.

The challenge is this is twofold: the color mixing is a challenge in and of itself and then having an idea of the values and where to leave complete white and where to keep taking it darker and darker to create contrast and a sense of light.

This would be a great exercise in ink or just black watercolor (of which I literally have none) to hash out the values first and then move to color second once you have a clear idea of the light and dark values firmly established.

Either way, how else would I want to spend a Sunday? Only painting white objects of course!