Sunday, June 1, 2014

Question ?

I love when people ask questions!

Yesterday a great one came up on The Mat while we were talking about hooking vast negative spaces and how to handle them. I thought I'd share with you in case you wonder the same thing.

"I'm interested in how people do different colored backgrounds for landscapes with large colorful skies. It's not so difficult to make different colored skies( other than blue) there are a  lot of them. Red, pink, purple, yellow. I want to make my background interesting by changing the color of the landscape. Something besides green or brown,  but how do you change the colors of the landscape and make it look right. This is probably a more involved topic than your asking right? Anyone out there have any simple suggestions for this?"

Here 's what I said:


You can go here in The Mat to study my tutorial on blending like values in the Free Online Classroom. This let's you use wide array of colours in any section of a landscape you like, such as a hill, but they do the job of making the hill appear as a hill where it should be because they are all the correct value for that space. Many colours making one statement, I'm a middle distance hill!


 That brings me to the idea that many colours need to be used in a landscape to create planes or the sensation of distance/depth. Each plane of the landscape creates it own " colour temperature, saturation and value costume " for the role they are playing in the total landscape. Brighter darker colours in the foreground, less so in the mid ground and duller, lighter colours in the background. This is why so much hooking work lays flat even when we are trying to create depth, not enough colours used in the proper places.

Here is a link to landscape art. LOOK AT ALL THE COLOURS USED!!!! Amazing. Now look more carefully how those colours play their role to create the landscape or do not in poorer examples.


It might also be good to look at Stephen Quiller who loves to use unexpected colours in traditonal style landscapes. A master!

PS Dear reader.... there are hundreds of tutorials on The Welcome Mat to enrich your rug hooking with 5 years of sinfully rich archives to dig through! Only $30 a year!

No comments:

Post a Comment