Six Painting Series for Color Theory: Part 5

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Mid-Twentieth Century American Playground 5
Matthew D. Hughes
Gouache on Bristol
9 1/2 x 12 1/2 inches
2011

One of the wonderful things about the medium of gouache is its versatility. In this painting, I used gouache much like one would use watercolors. By laying down multiple layers of translucent washes, I was able to achieve some areas of nuanced color. Take the underside of the slide, for example. Here, I used cooler colors to show that this area is in shadow. By layering blue and red-violet washes, you can see both colors working together to imply the coolness of the shade while also conveying differences in the planes of the surface.

For this painting, the assignment was to use Itten's principle of the contrast of saturation. In this color contrast, the point is to create areas of emphasis through using differing degrees of saturation. A color in its pure hue can be desaturated through mixing it with its compliment or by tinting (adding white), shading (adding black), or toning (adding black and white). By juxtaposing areas of saturated color (pure hue) with areas of desaturated color, contrasts are created. Sometimes, art work that is considered a contrast of saturation may have minimal areas of fully saturated color. These works often appear much more muted and nuanced.