fanfare and Klee

the kentucky derby. wow. theres a horseracing story:

each year for my grandpa's birthday, the whole extended family goes to Belmont for the day. grandma makes pnutbutter and jelly, grandpa, the aunts, and the uncles gamble. and if any one person wins too much, there's ice cream for all of us. no one wins that much. then we go to my aunt's house that's on the border of queens of nassau county and have bbq burgers. and most of us are sunburnt by then but don't really care.

so there's a certain comfort at the racetrack, just to be there without gambling yourself. i actually tried drawing the horses one year. i should do that this year. but it seems too much like... oh look at me i'm gonna use family bonding time to prove that i want to b an art-person. at the same time, WTH should i care- i need to learn how to draw horses.

i came up with a few examples of color-blending with watercolor. this is from a set i borrowed from Ganes, so its the same PRANG colors. Blue-Yellow. there are a few interpretations. and i really just wanted to paint.

note that these use a brick pattern for the placing of the squares. we'll just call them bricks. brick pattern works better for me, but Klee used more of a grid pattern. Gradatation is the change in color, from the first to the second. this can be through another color, a set of colors, or by interweaving the two original colors. Saturation is literally the same principle as the salinity of solutions: more dye, stronger/brighter color; low saturation in watercolor means there is more water. simple.

1st attempt: a more literal transition, with the same hues of two colors (blue and red). it doesn't work for me.

2nd attempt: different hues of the same colors (blue and yellow). theres some green in there, some orange in there, mixed in with the blue/yellow. it's more interesting, but the flow isn't right.

3rd attempt: this is what i think should happen, and is the hardest to do. color gradation from red to blue. there are greens and oranges mixed in here, one place or another, but the flow is intact. the saturation isn't as varied as it should be (in this pic, at least), but the purpose was to get a feel for the flow of color.