Color studies
The painting is the war scene, and the composition has the center of the interest leading your eyes to the soldiers building a pyramid making it the main element. The entrance of the scene is where the light shines the brightest and the exit is leading into the background to the ocean. The triadic color palette has green-yellow, orange-red, and the foreground having shades of violet-blue that builds dynamic lighting. The tense light color has bright orange-yellows with bouncing light on the ground of green-yellows. The further back the palm trees go the less light is bouncing, with more silhouetted of dark orange-greens pushing the perspective back creating a sunset scene.
My process involved using Photoshop and a hard brush with no pressure or changing opacity. I started by selecting colors from the photo and creating overlapping shapes to match the environment. I paid close attention to the contrasting shadows and shapes to build the scene and create depth. As I worked, I continually compared my painting to the original photo to ensure that I captured the essence of the environment. I also experimented with different brush sizes to create variations in the shapes and textures. Overall, the process allowed me to explore the colors and shapes of the pond in a new way, and I was pleased with the final result.
The rescue painting has split complementary colors with several colors of yellow, green, and blue-green that are used to complement the blue. The values become mid-tone shapes, and they gradually get lighter pushing the perspective further. The light source is used in the foreground that's highly rendered and creates sharp shadows. The dark and light contrast is like rough vs smooth having smooth rendered light shapes against rough sharp shapes of the dark. The values of the foreground use shade of blues, yellows, and greens building the form of the canyon. This draws the eye to focus on the men distinguishing them from the background using highlights and shade of blue-green creating more depth to the piece.
This composition uses analogous colors of blue-violet to yellow-orange/orange-yellow to create depth with the background lights pushing the darks in the foreground to become sharp shapes. The Yellows are the light source and the orange-yellow is being bounced off of the rocks creating a 3-dimensional scene. Also, it has lots of tonality of the violet and values of blues creating a relationship that works well with this scene pushing your focus towards the light source creating more depth with each element having a relationship with each other to create the composition.