Nathan Fawkes Analysis part 3

Well it seems like this is going to be an ongoing analysis of the paintings Nathan Fawkes does because I am amazed by the abstract quality of his pieces while at the same time he starts with such an abstract approach. 

Each day on Schooolism he adds another element and today he added the element of emotional content to the piece and we were told to create an image that feels like Joy. The cherry blossom tree above was his idea to make the piece about. Below after trying it myself I've taken some notes to be better prepared for next time. 

When I look at the final piece I am reminded of the way he organizes his colors in his warmup exercises. It feels like the whole thing is put together with patches of color first and then he goes in and blends them to create bridges between the different colors to make it more interesting, to give the edges unity and variety and to give the illusion of a form changing colors.

In the background for instance we see the sky color change from a green to a yellow when we see him blocking in the cloud shapes and we can see how the value subtly changes as the light is not able to hit the bottom of the clouds. We can also notice that the yellows in the background are lighter in value in general. with a major grouping of midtones in the center which connects these midtones to the foreground darker and smaller midtone shapes.

In terms of edges we see the top of the tree and the midtones in the sky connected to the tree shape is maintaining its hard edges while most of the clouds in the background and the bottom of the trees all have lost edges.

The smaller shapes that have a similar curve shape to the tree also have hard edges that make them stand out from their background. Below Ive written down some key takeaways from this video:

"For joy i start with a warm yellow...however neutrals and cool colors  will turn green if it is too yellow so I lighten it alot and take the saturation up."   

   " the sectre to joy, in art anyway, is about local color. we often think if we have blazing sun it will work but often times this yellow washes out the scene and doesnt leave a lot of color. So its important to find rich local color which is the color of a object with the abscence of light should work well."

When I go through and color pick the colors he is using I notice right away that all of the colors sit in the middle area for saturation and only the high key colors are in the lightest values, namely the greens and yellows. The tree however in its red, purple and orange all sit around the high mid saturation range. 

This is interesting and learning to decouple your thinking of  high saturation equaling high value is a key to getting better with color. Just because something has a lot of saturation, doesnt mean the colors will have the same value. We can see this in Sycras color value scale below.

When we look at the color/value scale we see that the reds and oranges are in their darker midtones while still staying high on the HSV color picker in procreate. This is because each color has its native value structure, we can see this here when we compare the black and white images together and see where each color falls in the value range.