Make your Paintings POP!

To continue with our week-long look at color, I thought that we'd see today how to use color to make your paintings POP!

In yesterday's post, I talked about how you can use color to unify your work. Although there are ways to both unify and still "pop" with color, and I advocate doing both, today we will explore the pop factor.

I am not talking about pop-art, but instead about how to play certain colors off one another to make a visual impact with your work.

In the example above, a photo of my dog that I manipulated and digitally painted, I changed her reddish brown color to a yellow orange, and then used an aqua and blue combination for the background. I did this because yellow-orange and aqua (marked with red dots on the wheel below) are opposites on the color wheel- complementary colors- which tend to look really dynamic when used together in the same painting. You can see that I also marked the blue and yellow that are shown across from each other as well. I also used them in the same piece.

How about trying out a small painting utilizing color opposites on the wheel to give it a dynamic punch?! Choose any two colors directly acroos from each other on the wheel and use them as your main choices. Let me see what you come up with!