Blue Practice Pastels

Guess that title can be taken many ways.  In my last class with Enid Wood enidwood.com we were working on pastel paintings using the color BLUE.

Blue can be a bit tricky as there are sooooo many variations in color and temperature.  For shadows and to push something back in your painting, you usually use a cool blue.  Warm blues for sunny skies.  It really depends on the color around it and each painting.

The complement is orange.  Orange mixed into blue dulls the blue toward gray.  Put blue and orange beside eachother and the colors vibrate.

Here are a few blues that you can compare. Which look cool?  The feel will change depending on what they are next to.  On the white they look darker, on the black they look lighter and on the orange very intense.

 

This is my blue practice painting.  I did it on a rust/orange Colourfix sanded paper (9 x 12) and you can see the color peeking through to add texture and interest to the blue.

I put "color" in my search box on the left and pulled up these posts about color, value and painting.  A good review!
http://jocastilloartblog.blogspot.com/search?q=color

You can put Instruction or other key words and find more posts in the "how to" genre.

Tomorrow will be our GREEN lesson.  I'll show you my practice after class.  It is so good for me to get together with other artists.  You should try it sometime.