Monochromatic

The challenge this week is to use a Monochromatic palette to create your planner page!  Oooh, can you see me rubbing my hands and smacking my lips?  I am a color ‘ho’ – love everything about it . . . mixing, studying, hues, shades, tints, spectrum, color wheel, primary, secondary, tertiary, analagous . . . oh my goodness, my head is going to explode!  I could do a challenge every week using some principle of color!  And monochromatic?  I LOVE IT!  Monochromatic is defined as colors you can derive from a single hue by adding white for a tint or black (or grey) for a shade of that same hue.  Well, that sounds complicated, so let me just show you!

I chose a single color (Quinacridone Crimson) for my hue!  By mixing increasing amount of white, I made tints of Quinacridone Crimson as shown in the swatch below.

On the next swatch, I created shades of Quinacridone Crimson by mixing black in increasing amounts.  Like I said, I could do this all year!

Now, something to paint in my monochromatic theme . . . I sketched this young girl all ready for spring in her pretty dress!  Just a pencil sketch and I added a bit of shadowing as a guideline to where I would paint my shades and tints.  I mixed up some puddles on my palette and got started!

I started with the lights first, even leaving some places completely white.  Then I continued to fill in the shadows with darker and darker shades and you can see how the little girl is coming to life!

And now she is finished!  The entire exercise took less time to do than to prepare this blog post!  Have fun with your monochromatic theme this week.  Don’t fret if you can’t draw or paint, try collageing bits of colored paper in varying shades or even stripes and patterns.  Give it a try – it’s fun and as usual, I can’t wait to see what you come up with!  And don’t forget to check out the other Art to the 5th Artist blogs – you can find them here:

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