Acrylic Practice
3yr
Crystal Blue (she/her)
As advised, I did some studies with basic shapes and painting food and textures.
I feel pretty confident about the shapes, but getting the colors right on the potatoes was difficult.
Any advice would be appreciated!
3yr
Apparently it's a bit too saturated and the potatoes actually look "more pink than yellow", and lighter in the photo. IMO the general rule is never go very saturated when you paint, unless you want to emphasize a special point of interest (usually only red/yellow ish colour can reach a natural high saturation in real life). If you have some white you can add and see how much difference it makes. A lot of times the colour is just gray "with a tint of" something else.
Because I use black and white paint a lot, so I don't tend to use complementary colour that much to mix because that's gonna get muddy very quickly. But you should try using that and see if that kind of colour result is actually what you want.
The main problem I see here is actually value/brightness.See how the potato to the left is lit on the top left portion? I can see on your paint you are trying to lift that area with saturation, that's not usually gonna work unless you already were in a region that's heavily limited in values. Try thinning the paint there or use white in the mix. You will typically find "Ahh that looks even weirder" when mixing a lighter tone on the palette but when you apply it on top it will bring the value to the right place.
Also, I don't think you need to necessarily get the colour "right". if you wrap your potato paintins with a light yellow ish background, the potato will appear to have a "correct" colour because the relative relationship of hue and value is then closer.
3yr
I think if you tried to keep the silhouettes of the shapes a little clearer it would help a lot. For the colours you can mix any colour with its complementary to desaturate it. Maybe that will help! :)