Even for those of us who love color, every once in a while it's fun to experiment by painting with one color only. Using just one color really helps you see your painting in terms of lights and darks. I find doing this helps me establish values when I carry what I've learned over to my usual, multicolor work.
Sepia is a great color to use for this exercise. Not only does it evoke old-time photography, it also can be used in a range from very dark, almost black, to subtle, minky shades.
Here are two small paintings I've done using only sepia. Both are from old family photos; the one at the top is a quick sketch done without any pencil drawing. The bottom one may not be quite finished.
Have you tried this? What do you think of using just one color?
Sometimes the hardest thing for an artist is to tell when a painting is "finished".
I dashed off this watercolor sketch the other day. I painted it quickly on a quarter sheet of watercolor paper, without doing any pencil drawing beforehand. It looks fresh, and it conveys the scene and the feeling I was going for. But it looks somehow incomplete.
Yet I'm hard pressed to figure out what to do to finish it. I'm concerned that if I fiddle with it a lot more, I will ruin the freshness and spontaneity of this little sketch. There have been way too many times where I've kind of liked a piece but couldn't resist making one more change or adding one more thing, and then regretted it.
Right now I'm inclined to leave this painting alone. Maybe I'll do a second version of this idea, with more pre-planning, careful drawing, and more detail.
How about you? How do you know when something is finished? Have you ever been sorry you added "one more thing" to a completed painting?
