Beauty in Chaos

Being partially colorblind, I have a hard time differentiating what the colors I use are, thankfully most of them are labeled so that helps, but when I start mixing my own colors figuring out what they are can be tricky. I like to use really bright colors because I can see them much better.

I tried to keep a cool and warm color scheme in this painting, with the fire holding the bulk of the warm tones shown and the flowers contrasting those warm tones with a cooler color scheme. The butterflies are what I thought did a good job bringing the ideas of warm and cool tones together. I used two different wing patterns that the larger of the seven butterflies are done with, then when painting the butterflies I wanted to show that they were connected so I did the teal butterflies with the pointed wing pattern and the light pink ones with a more rounded edge to them. Lastly with the most detailed flower I wanted to make it different than all the other flowers in the background. Using a warm tone really made it stand out.

Looking at this painting in person is much different than seeing it through a screen, along with the elements of colors, texture is used to add detail as well. The bottom layer of flames has a bit of molding paste across it all that I added a wave like pattern to. To add shading in on the flames I used charcoal, and watered down acrylic paint. Together these two methods gave a nice shadow look.

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