Laure Ferlita's Artful Journaling - Week 2 Lesson 4: Combining Design Elements

This week's assignment..., "...let's slow down a bit and make sure we're really getting the concepts of Positive Space, Negative Space and Values as well as remembering to "design" our pages to incorporate titles and/or word art, borders, and backgrounds.

I tried this with a bowl of curry chicken...it's okay...I do question my values. Also not so sure about purple for the background color.  Should I have used green since it's the complement of red?

Original Photo

Laure Ferlita's Artful Journaling - Week 2 Lesson 3: Value Study

This lesson was to focus on a value study.  Create a monotone picture first, then apply what I learned about value to the color picture.  I chose a scene of shored up long boats on the island of Koh Phi Phi in southern Thailand.  The original photo itself isn't that great, but it did lend itself to value study.  My one piece of self-criticism is I think I may have gone too dark on the leaves of the tree.

Original Photograph

Laure Ferlita's Artful Journaling - Week 1 Lesson 2: Negative Space

Paint the negative space around an image using our signature color (mine is perylene red)...  I really wanted to do the Golden Buddha from the Golden Buddhist Temple in Bangkok but didn't like the idea of the Buddha being white with shades of red to give it shape, so I decided to paint a background that was a mixture of quinacridone gold, quin. deep gold, raw sienna, and Holbein antique gold (metallic).  For texture I placed a crumpled up piece of plastic wrap on this and let it dry.  I love the background!  The golden Buddha in my original photograph is covered in thousands of small squares of gold sheets that people buy and rub onto the Buddha when they visit the temple.  The picture below doesn't capture the metallic gold sheen of many of the sections.  It was a perfect background color for the Buddha.

Original Photo