Written and Photo Documentation: Final Picasso Horse Painting

Questions:

1. Describe the monochromatic colour scheme you chose. Did you choose analogous or 

complimentary for accent colour? Explain your reasoning for choosing this colour.

The monochromatic colour scheme I chose consists of mainly red-orange and orange colours. For my accent colour, I chose a complimentary colour. The reason I chose this colour was that I wanted to make the horse stand out a lot as I realized it was lacking multiple viewpoints. The colour I chose for the accent was a mixture of yellow, blue and white. As you can see, I used a lot more blue than yellow, but I still wanted a  green tinge so that the colour would actually be opposite on the colour wheel. I used the white to both lighten the colour, but also to take away some of the sheen so that the background did not dominate the painting.

2. Describe the process of planning out your design of the horse drawing in the style of 

Picasso and the painting process? What were some difficulties that came up in the 

process and some positive developments in your process?

To start off, I used the tracing of the horse on tracing paper to give myself an idea of what the final product would look like. By looking at the traced horse on see through paper, it made it a lot easier to visualize. After that, one the other side of the tracing paper, I basically straightened the curves on the horse to make it look more blunt like in Picasso's paintings. Following that, I played around with a second sheet of tracing paper basically trying to make the horse look less "natural". From this, I had the pencil outline of my horse. Using the pressing technique, I transferred this drawing onto a piece of white paper. 

When I started to paint, all I really knew was that using red could make the unnatural shapes of my horse stand out like Picasso did with his paintings, so that is how I came up with red. Once I started painting, I started with what should have been the darkest areas of my horse, (hooves ect.) and lightened the colour as I worked away from those areas. To lighten the colour, I used more yellow as opposed to white. 

A problem I encountered was having difficulty letting go of the orange in my painting. As you can see below, most of the process paintings are all orange with slightly darker shades of red-orange. I chose the blue-green shade for the background because I wanted the horse to stand out against it. I was afraid the background would swallow the horse though, so I added a white outline to the horse.

Process Photos: