Color Studies

My last L5R remake is going to be another environment.  I haven't finalized what it'll be yet, but I do know that I really want to really punch up the colors so that it's more vibrant and exciting than the Oyo Seido piece.  Color has always been my weakness, so I decided to do some long overdue color exercises. It's a pretty simple exercise that most any artist can do, and it only takes a couple of hours.

First I looked for a bunch of mountain landscapes on Google images, picking a variety of scenes and colors. Next I prepared a set oh nine thumbnail sized canvases.  Then one by one I attempt to recreate the color scheme of each photograph, making sure to never use the eyedropper tool (unless the color has already been laid down).  It's a trick I learned from someone else's blog (I forget which), but the idea was to train your eyes to really see color and decide which colors to lay down instead of just picking a swatch and/or picking a color from a photograph.  I don't know how successful the exercise was, but it was a lot of fun, and I'll probably do a couple more of these before hunkering down and working on the next piece.