I dive into my “Elements of Design” plan this time and decided to pay attention to value and Space. Value referring to the dark and light in a painting and space being aware of where objects are in the painting relative to one another. To do this, I chose to try a monochrome painting in blue of some islands.

I started with a sketch of where I wanted the islands in pencil. Then, like I learned from the last videos, I painted a light grey wash over the whole page.

The clouds were done by mixing a very light black at first and adding more saturated colour where the shadows (value) would be under them. Starting with the lightest colours and adding darker until I achieved the result I wanted. As you can see in the video, the sky is something I let dry and come back to several times. I found this technique works well for clouds.

For the islands, I started with a light blue/grey wash and then filled in my outline. of the farthest ones. They would be the lightest to give the Illusion of being the farthest away and in the misty clouds. I used a light blue and pulled the black from the outline to make it look like the shadows of the clouds on the island. This makes the islands look more realistic. The next closest islands are added using a darker value (more black, less blue).

Overall I like how this painting turned out! I also feel like I learned something while paying attention to a few Elements of Design instead of simply following a photograph or video. and focusing on two elements was easy to manage.

Here is the video!