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Thursday, May 27, 2021

T&T Thursday!

 

COLOR

By Alex Zonis


PART 2

Color Contrasts

Contrast is an easy concept to understand, it is intuitive. Renaissance painters mainly used value contrast; the Impressionists relied on temperature contrasts. But there are more contrasting relationships available to artists, we will talk about seven different ones.




1. Hue Contrast

Strong intense colors placed side-by-side produce powerful and dramatic contrast. Children and artists working in style called Primitivism use this contrast very effectively. Use as many colors as you like as long as they are pure and bright. If you add an olive green or mustard yellow to the mix, the combination will stop working.







2. Value Contrast


The squares with greater value contrast draw attention. The lighter squares seem to be filled with light and darker squares appear somber. The famous Chiaroscuro effect, that elevated Caravaggio into the pinnacle of Renaissance painting, is high value contrast. Chiaroscuro means “light-dark” in Italian.







3. Color Key


Color key brings drama to artwork. High-key colors, like tints and middle tones at the lighter end of the value scale, are usually pure colors that suggest bright illumination, making the work cheerful and optimistic. Low-key colors, such as low-intensity and dark values, indicate dim illumination, create serious, sad or pensive mood.









4. Intensity Contrast

Pure color stands out against neutral gray and low intensity background. The contrast decreases against the same hue background






5. Complementary Contrast 

Complementary colors are the opposites on the color wheel. Placed side by side they enhance each other. Mixed together as pigments they neutralize each other. Tertiary complements make unusual color combinations because they are less common.








6. Temperature Contrast 

It may sound strange to talk about temperature of color. However experiments demonstrated a difference of 5-7 degrees in subjective feeling of warm and cold in rooms painted blue-green and red-orange. On the color wheel Red-orange is the warmest color and blue-green is the coolest. 


We can achieve multiple effects working with color temperature: 

  • Cold - Warm
  • Shadow - Sun
  • Sleepy - Awake
  • Airy - Earthy
  • Far - Near 

  • Light - Heavy
  • Fire - Water


Impressionists relied on temperature contrast rather than value contrast to suggest light. Warm and cool contrast provides movement around the form, because warm colors appear to come forward and cool colors recede into the background.






7. Quantity Contrast

Quantity contrast is a powerful visual tool and one of my favorites to use. It works like an exclamation point in language, used right it is very expressive and impossible to miss.







Color is vast and fascinating subject! 

What we offered here is a tiny portion of existing knowledge, but it is the beginning of the exploration.





Wednesday, May 26, 2021

Show and Tell

 


Let's Sketch

Show and Tell

Sunday, May 30

12 PM - 3 PM


Hosted by



As we continue to sketch virtually and get closer to gathering together, let’s take the opportunity to share new tools or techniques you’ve learned over the past year.

  • Maybe you bought a new pen, pencil, or brush
  • Maybe you’ve been trying out a new paint, gouache, or ink
  • Maybe you found the perfect paper or sketchbook
  • Maybe you practiced a particular technique, or reinforced an existing one
We’d love to see how you used them and learn together.

Details:

Share your on location sketch, displaying your new tools and/or technique in your sketch photo or additional photo. Please provide a description and your findings, whether it worked out or not. We may not be able to all sketch together just yet, but we can still learn from each other!

Don’t forget to hashtag sponsors! 

Remember that we are following USk Global’s guidelines of sketching live on location and not from reference photos. All skill levels welcome – happy sketching! 

As usual, we will post from noon to 3 p.m. to share and discuss, but late submissions are always welcome.
Please include #uskchicago and #uskathome on your posts to Facebook and Instagram.


Want to keep up to date by email? Fill in your email address in the place provided in the upper right corner under the banner. We look forward to hearing from you.

Wednesday, May 19, 2021

Celebrate National Bike Week!

 



Let's Sketch

Bikes

Sunday, May 23

12 PM - 3 PM


Hosted by




May is National Bike Month

  • Bike to Work Week is May 17-23
  • Bike to Work Day on Friday,May 21, 2021 

For more information check out  The League of American Bicyclists 


Let's join the celebration of biking as transportation, as recreation, as essential to our well-being and everyday lives, by sketching!


Details

Celebrate our favorite two-wheel, people-propelled vehicles! 

Don’t worry if you don’t have a bike, you can still sketch scenes from a bike path, bike racks or bike art. It’s supposed to be nice out there this weekend, get your bike out and sketch!


Remember that we are following USk Global’s guidelines of sketching live on location and not from reference photos. When outside your home, be sure to follow current public health recommendations. All skill levels welcome – happy sketching! 


As usual, we will gather from noon to 3 p.m. to share and discuss, but late submissions are always welcome.


Banner sketch credits, clockwise from upper left:

Emmanuel Semmes, 5/30/17

Arun Dabholkar, 3/2/21

Harold Goldfus, 9/14/17

Wendy Easton, 8/23/20



Please include #uskchicago and #uskathome on your posts to Facebook and Instagram.


Want to keep up to date by email? Fill in your email address in the place provided in the upper right corner under the banner. We look forward to hearing from you.




Thursday, May 13, 2021

T&T Thursday

COLOR

By Alex Zonis


Part 1


Let’s have the good news first: color can be learned! Great colorists of the past – Turner, Delacroix, van Gogh – used the science of color. Their color is no accident or chance.


There are numerous theories and approaches to color out there. Many are helpful and can be used for practical purposes with great success. We will discuss one of them - Color Theory by Johannes Itten. Itten is regarded as a father of modern color theory. Some agree and some argue, but the bottom line is that Itten came up with a system to make using color manageable.


Going back to centuries past we want to mention Isaac Newton who discovered that visible light can be split in color bands using a prism and Count Rumford who discovered that those bands can be combined again to make something close to white light. (More on visible spectrum in Wikipedia) - 


Then it was discovered that an object appears a certain color when white light strikes it because the color of the object is reflected and the remaining light rays are absorbed.


These are fundamentals. More interesting discoveries were made, but what is important for us here is the discovery of subtractive primary colors: red, yellow and blue. This is big! Everything else flows from here. In ideal world adding any two of these primary colors produces a secondary color:


Red + Yellow = Orange

Yellow + Blue = Green

Red + Blue = Purple



Basic Theory, Color Equations and Triads


In basic color theory the primary color cannot be mixed or made from other colors. All other colors can be created from the primaries. Our color equations look like this:






Note 3 primaries, 3 secondaries, and 6 tertiary colors. They are organized into 3 basic types of triads (primary triad, secondary triad and 2 tetriary triads). These triads make a complete color wheel of 12 colors. If we take these colors and position them in a circle, we will get a simplified color wheel!






Now this begins to look like something we have seen before. How many of us have an object like this among our art supplies, probably stuffed in the back somewhere because it made irritatingly little sense?



Perhaps now it will make a little more sense! Dig it out and take a look - there is some really neat information on it!




If you are like me, you probably scrolled ahead, past the theoreticals, and are looking for good practical stuff.  This is the good practical stuff – color schemes!



Color Schemes


Leafing through your sketchbook you will likely note the similarity of colors on your various sketches. We tend to find something that works for us, satisfies our aesthetics to some degree, and we then run with it.


How can we expand our vision on colors, get out of out boundaries of habit? Regardless of the media we use - paint, markers, color pencils - we can use the logical relationships of colors on the color wheel to control and expand our palette. This is where color schemes come into play.


Color schemes are based on color similarities or differences, and usually feature a dominant color. 

  • Color schemes based on similarity are monochromatic (one color in different values) or analogues (colors that are neighbors on the color wheel). 
  • Color schemes based on difference are composed of complementary or triadic relationships, they are opposites or triangles on the wheel.

An exception is a pure color contrasted with a neutral – white, gray or black.





Here are some example sketches for each of the 8 color schemes:




Note how much variety of middle tones Don uses in this sketch. This variety creates the richness even though the drawing is monochromatic.



This is my sketch, I use an analogous color scheme from dark red-brown through orange to yellow. This set of colors creates harmony. One speck of green punctuates this harmony, but we will discuss this in the next chapter.


Complementary color schemes usually have an added benefit of simplifying the image, like here a fairly complex market scene depicted in yellows and purples appears calm and relaxed.




Many have seen this amazing yellow plane at Architectural Artifacts at our sketch crawl. What makes this sketch successful is its pure Triadic color scheme executed in primary colors. Yes, I made the brick wall more red and designs on the rug more blue to make the triad more obvious.



An interesting variety results when we can split a complement into two colors. The image become richer and more complex.




Notice how yellow, yellow-orange and orange are balanced out by blue-violet shadows and recesses give the eye a resting point.



When I teach color class, students find that this color scheme the most puzzling. That is until they realize that this is just two pairs of complements that are adjacent or next to each other on the color wheel. Like here:  yellow and violet is one pair, and yellow-orange and blue-violet is the second pair. That's all there is to it, complicated name non-withstanding.




See how the main colors of this sketch red-orange, yellow, blue-green and violet are positioned on a color wheel. They form a rectangle, this makes it a tetradic color scheme. Tetradic is a well balanced scheme, and this quality can be used to balance a composition.





Wednesday, May 12, 2021

And We're Back! (With a FewTemporary Guidelines)

 




Let's Sketch

Chicago - Washington Square Park

Sunday, May 16

12 PM - 3 PM



Details

The time has come!

The time for us to try for real - IN PERSON - USk Chicago get together! Our first since Feb 2020, first in 15 months!


While things are looking better and infection danger appears to recede, everyone’s situation and sensibility is different. It is important for us to remember this and to support each other wherever we are.


GUIDELINES
  • Our main GUIDELINE for in-person gathering is to respect each others personal space. 
  • Please do not come closer than 6 feet unless invited.
  • Have a mask with you or on you, in case you need it.
  • Please no hugs or handshakes - no partying like it is 2019 LOL


Still in the future

There will be no throwdown - for now - let’s share our sketches in our FB group like we've been doing for more than a year.
No group photo for the time being, admins will be taking individual photos to share online after the meetup.


And finally… 

  • We will meet in Washington Square Park, by the fountain in the center - a favorite spot from many occasions in the past.
  • We will sketch and enjoy each others company from 12 pm - 3 pm. Can hardly wait!


The painting of Washington Square park fountain on the banner is by Don Yang. 




901 N Clark Street
Chicago


Please include #uskchicago and  on your posts to Facebook and Instagram.


Want to keep up to date by email? Fill in your email address in the place provided in the upper right corner under the banner. We look forward to hearing from you.


Wednesday, May 5, 2021

Day by Day

 




Let's Sketch

Progressive Sketches

Sunday, May 9

12 PM - 3 PM


Hosted by



This week our guest host is Bob Glazauskis. Recently, Bob has been doing “progressive sketches” and we thought it would make a good prompt for the group.


Details

Pick a location, either inside or outside, and create a sketch there over a period of time. 


This could be over a few hours, or over a few days. Finish it up on the meet day with changes added to the sketch that you observe that day.

  • there could be changes to the light,
  • changes in the weather
  • the growth of a plant in a vase
  • or even additions to the location that were not there in the first leg of the sketch


This can be done in many creative ways!

  • Consider adding a little bit to your sketch each day to create a final work
  • or using “ghost lines” to overlay changing information as time passes. This can be a really fun way to observe changes you would normally take for granted.


The banner shows Bob’s finished progressive sketch done over 3 days at Kenosha harbor. 


Here is how he describes his process:

“Here is a progressive urban sketch I did on location from the same spot in front of the Balance of Justice sculpture at the channel entrance of the Kenosha Wi. harbor. I did it during the pre-sunrise dawn in the half hour before the sun broke over the horizon, sketching with pen & ink and watercolors during the brief time period, incorporating what I thought was the best element of each day into one sketch. 

Day 1. Was grey clouds! 

Day 2. Was orange and yellows on the horizon!

Day 3. Was a purplish cast in the sky and on the water!”




As usual, we will gather from noon to 3 p.m. to share and discuss, but of course late submissions are always welcome. Remember that we follow USk Global’s guidelines of sketching live on location and not from reference photos. Please include #uskchicago and #uskathome on your posts to Facebook and Instagram.


Want to keep up to date by email? Fill in your email address in the place provided in the upper right corner under the banner. We look forward to hearing from you.