Another grid exercise

Today we did the follow-up to Tuesday's grid exercise. Just as reminder, the idea is to play with depth and space. On Tuesday we did that just with value. Now we add also color. And to make things a bit more interesting, we use only primaries, in my case I used CadYellow, CadRed and Ultramarin. I was tempted to add a cool red to the mix but resisted temptation (the blue was a warm tone, so I had three warm toned colors).

Here is the result of that one. At first I actually didn't like the piece at all - it seemed too chaotic. Then I stepped farther back and took a break and I saw more merit in the piece. I did do some changes at that point that didn't really change the image much but just heightened some focus here or there and the result is much stronger than it was before. So now I actually like the piece.

This may not be visible on the small photo but this was painted on illustration board that was primed with two layers of gesso (sponge roller) which gives a very interestingly textured surface. This enabled me to do some fairly interesting sgraffito work on the piece. In some areas one can see that there is some form in red and yellow that was covered up with blue and then the blue was slightly scraped away which makes the underlying form shine through in little dots here and there. A nice effect that I quite like. This effect is best visible at the far right about half-way up the piece.