Paint Out with Ian Roberts

We met at the park.  Ian's demonstration was more of a class than a paint out.  The thought behind the class was that if you were going to contend for the attention of viewers in a show than you would have to master color intensity.  The reason for mastering color intensity is that you want the viewer to be interested in your painting.  A contest boils down to keeping the publics attention on your art and not someone elses.  If you can not master color intensity then your paintings will be like loose cannons.-

Ian went into detail about the key to keeping the viewer in the painting is mastering where to pop your color by controlling the color intensity everywhere else in the painting.  Keep the foreground intersting but under control by using muted, saturated grays so that your area of interest really captures the attention of the viewer

Ian went into what his pallet consists of and why.  His focus in the discussion was to establish a consistent base for the artist to work from.  His suggestion was to make everything familiar from the way you laid out the paint and arranged it on the pallet to the colors you used so that you could better focus on mixing the colors.  His pallet consists of a warm and a cool color of each hue.  Ian said the first step of the excercise could take the whole day. The most important thing was to be able to match the colors we saw and wanted to include in our painting. If we are to manipulate the attention of the viewer through our painting we must be able to realistically match what we see and put it in our paintings.  Once we were able to match the color chips that Ian provided us; his direction was to then paint an equally intense but different color that he picked below our color match.  There were only two pastelists and I was one of them.  It was very difficult to take an oil painting approach to mixing colors and to get them to match.  The effort above took a couple of hours.  You would be amazed how many colors I put into this