Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian painter from the 1900's to the 1940's who often focused on the Der Blaue Reiter movement. The Der Blaue Reiter movement was structured around colors and form in how they interacted with each other to bring unity to the piece. This unity was thought to bring spiritual values to the elements in the pieces, particularly since they were abstract elements. The movement is called Der Blaue Reiter because the founders' believed blue contained the most spiritual energy. I was inspired by Kandinsky's pieces titled Improvision 26 and Merry Structure. At first I was inspired by Improvision 26 for the way it blended colors together so effectively while still leaving behind residue of the original color at the place it was originally put. Improvision 26 seemed to give out a feeling of true watercolor, as if the brush were put on the paper and left there for the paper to absorb the color. The shapes on the piece are truly organic as they have seemingly no pattern to their curves and lines. The mix of color was also strategic as there were only primary and secondary colors in the piece. These colors were then balanced by black lines and shapes that brought unity to the overall piece.
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However I wanted to have more sophisticated elements of abstract art in my piece by having less organic shapes in my piece and more geometric ones. I also liked the pattern of warm colors balanced by cool colors in Merry Structure. The whole paper was balanced by different groups of shapes in strategically placed areas of the paper, for example, there was a variety of squares placed on the lower right hand corner with each square being a different shade of red. I also liked that shapes were often made using various thin lines with a variety of brown and black lines of different thicknesses in the lower left hand corner to bring to bring a balance to the strong red squares in the lower right hand corner. I wanted to have that kind of balance in my piece so I planned on doing a similar pattern with squares in the bottom right corner and thick and thin lines on the lower left hand corner.
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For my second sketch, I tried to get a better feel on how to get different opacities with the gouache as well as how to spread the gouache on the paper so that as I spread it the opacity would make the same shape look as if it were different shades of the same color by simply having different opacities.
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The first thing I did was spread yellow gouache in a seemingly transparent shade in the lower left hand corner of the paper with gradual increase in the opacity. I also then layered the corner with increasingly warmer colors such as orange and red. The red color was at the very corner of the paper followed by the orange and then the yellow. I then drew a square pyramid similar to Kandinsky's in the lower right hand corner with a pencil and then painted each square in different opacities of reds, oranges, and yellows as well as different shades by mixing the shades of red, orange, and yellow I had. I made sure to get crisp edges by putting painter's tape on the line so that the gouache would not bleed out of the square. While painting one of the highest squares I had an orange shade drip onto a spot on the board and tried to use a napkin to absorb it off the paper, however, it still left a stain. I then used that same shade that had dripped into the paper to and painted a circle where the gouache had fallen.
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After I finished painting the squares and turning the stain that dripped into the paper into a circle, I painted red and blue triangles above each row of squares and outlined one of the squares in black paint. I then began to paint elements on other areas of the paper, such as a yellow circle in the upper right hand corner of the paper and blue lined at the top middle of the paper. I then also outlined the yellow circle in the upper right hand corner in brown paint to emphasize it's presence in the piece.
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The next big element of the piece was the big yellow triangle I painted in the middle left hand side of the paper. I made it by putting painter's tape on the page in the shape of a triangle and then painting the triangle to tape made in yellow gouache, using water to get different levels of opacity in different areas of the triangle. I then made organic shapes under the yellow triangle and began to make geometric shapes in red and blue paint to stick to the theme or primary colors. Since the yellow triangle took such a large amount of space in the page I wanted blue and red shaped to balance the presence of the large yellow triangle so I painted a blue circle to the right of the triangle and red and blue squares to the top left of the triangle. When painting the aforementioned squares I wanted to have them be more transparent so right after I painted them I dabbed them with a napkin so that it would absorb the color leaving only a small amount of color left behind.
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Next I outlined the orange circle by the square pyramid and made two more triangles on the page. The first one I made was red and the next was brown, they were both made in the same manner the yellow triangle was made with painter's tape. The red triangle had the bottom part of it look unfinished since the painter's tape had made some of the paint not go onto certain areas but I used it as an opportunity to outline the bottom part of the triangle in black paint. I moved the painter's tape down a bit and I made sure that the tape was in the same angle as the bottom of the triangle. I then painted the border of the triangle in black gouache with a high opacity. On one of the swipes I accidentally went a little bit upwards so I decided to fix it by making a pattern of small triangles along the border of the red triangle. I then also added two intersecting yellow lines with red and blue lined around it.
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