Harmonious Color Schemes
Montana Horse Gallery, Donna Allen Weber, Fine Artist
Harmonious Color
Color plays a large part in how you want your paintings to look. Carpenter's have hammers nails and boards. Mechanics have wrenches. Artists have their own little tool box. Color is my favorite tool. Value was my most important tool, for making my images stand out on the page, but it's color that makes them sing. Color gives you the mood of your painting and sets the tone for how you want a viewer to feel when they view it. That's right, as an artist, you have power, the power to make people feel emotions. Harmonious color is peaceful and calming.
I'm using photos for this demonstration on harmonious color, along with some paintings I've done. You can see in this photo of deer, the colors are basically all the same. Variations of light and dark, all different colors of brown. Artists will use a color scheme like this when they want to create something with a peaceful feel to it. Everything about this color scheme whispers to you. It's beautiful in it's simplicity and you love it for the serene, comfortable feel you get when you look at it.
In this painting, The Beauty of Brown, I used harmonious colors. I created some drama with the addition of the backlight shining on the horses and by adding the black horse. In my original photo, that horse was a palomino. We can take artistic liberty with our reference photos. We don't have to paint them exactly like we see them! If I'd left that horse his original color, I could have found a way to pull that painting off, but it would have felt differently than what I was wanting here.
On to the Complimentary Color Scheme!
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