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1ore β Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum
Published: 2019-07-25 22:12:08 +0000 UTC; Views: 2230; Favourites: 340; Downloads: 0
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[Image: The view from the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and Saguaro National Park, looking north. The sky is huge and heavy with a stormfront, glowing like fire in the evening sun as a few saguaros scrape the clouds.]
β
! She's here!
I was very kindly approached by TWWM staff to do banner artwork for Majanthi's greenhouse, back in June, which was a.) extremely my bullshit and b.) very humbling ;_; It was also the perfect excuse to paint some places I've wanted to for a long time.
This is one of them, the view north from the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. I had the chance to visit it in the fall semester last year, and was really taken in by it, both as an institution and by its location. I remember looking north and seeing streaks of light in the open desert below the museum, not all sure if they were mirages or just large bodies of water deposited by the rain. If you're ever in the Tucson area I highly recommend hitting the museum up while you're there, It's really something that you can't miss!
I have a few videos and photos from when I was there here, some of which I used as references while painting.
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Comments: 34
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Oh thank you so much!! And again for taking a look at sonderoan, wow ;o;
funny enough, I think I've been to like... one waterfall in-state, and I can't even remember its name x^p I have a feeling it was on the verde somewhere but I was too young to remember. Plenty of rivers, though! Tres Rios and the Rio Salado Habitat Restoration Area are right in our backyard, and the RSHRA has some fun water features on the "outfalls" that feed the river.
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Oh, man, thank you so much!!
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This is quite literally breathtaking. *clutches heart* the sky really looks massive and gorgeous and each color is picked so perfectly i'm weak... the bird is also a perfect addition!
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Thank you so, so much! ;_; that is a high honor, I'm really glad it spoke to your corneas hahaha
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HIGH FIVE!! I'm too far north to make it out there regularly ;_; enjoy your neck of desert for me!
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omg... just scream into the night......... i'm screaming back at you............ (like this )
((anyway THANK YOU!!))
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YES YES THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I WAS THINKING OF
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Once again I find you channeling your inner Georgia O'Keefe to mesmerizing effect! I'm intrigued about your color palette choice, which to me it always comes out as a well restrained and judiciously picked range of complementary earth colors. How do you pick your colors?
I bring that up also because I just finished inking my current project and I'm about to start adding color to it. Ive been wanting to experiment with restrained color palettes but so far I've ended up taking the easy way out by throwing in the full color gamut.Β
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First of all-- thank you so much for the kind words and for this thoughtful question ;_; I should probably foreword this with I'm Not Professionally Trained and I strongly believe that there are other artists who can teach the fundamentals of color better than I. But I can, at least, speak for how I personally arrive where I do. Some of it might be useful to you, much of it probably won't. Take the best and leave the rest.
Now, as for color... I've talked a liiiiiittle bit before about how I go about choosing color , mostly in the context of storytelling. The relevant portions quoted here;
Color is also something thatβs tied up in storytelling, for me, but maybe in weirder ways than it otherwise would be. Each story in Moribund has a distinct set of palettes that I trend towards; The island Mercasor is like a memory of home to me, and is very bright, vibrant, and warm (red-turquoise-gold), where Asthaom is somewhat starker, harder, with history that has colored it more difficultly (blue-black-grey-red-bronze; usually desaturated.)
Color-picking is hard to dig at without getting into the works that guide those choices, so lemme reel that inβ¦ I try to approach color with the same sense of character that I do environments and story. I tend to choose palettes for a piece the same way that I do when Iβm designing a character or object; they are often fairly limited, and youβll see me reuse the same shades and pigments across an entire picture , sometimes even overriding colors that are distinct to a certain characterβs design even if they would realistically persist in such lighting. This can unite the most radically unlike characters in a common world and emotional space, orβ if those colors are left intactβ set them apart and bring visual focus to them.
Itβs probably worth mentioning that Moribundβs visuals are rooted in tapestries, murals, reliefs, and other traditional works of art, particularly here in the southwest. Picking colors like this probably wouldnβt be conducive to, say, a cyberpunk dystopia settingβ but really, thatβs the fun of navigating color and its relationship with the story youβre putting together.
In Moribund, I have the benefit of designing characters / objects / environs with the intention of them occupying the same cultural and emotional space-- which means I can just straight-up give everyone color palettes that are synchronous and easy to coordinate. I think the same thinking is true for these landscape pieces... But instead of designing "commonalities" into the elements in the scene, I'm sort of reverse engineering them from the real world. There's common ground between what's already there, I just have to figure out where, and make judicious decisions about what I can cut, and what I can keep.
The palette for this particular piece was actually inspired by a photograph I took early in the morning, driving into Tucson. You can see how the foreground falls away into this indigo black, while the sky is allowed to run a full lilac-grey-gold-peach. The nice thing about color is it's extremely contextual, and it gets even more wiggly when you have really stark or dramatic lighting, like in the sunset here. I only needed two or three shades of this indigo to suggest the forms that I wanted to in the foreground, with the addition of a grey-teal for the green ribs of the saguaros (you might have to color pick to see what i mean-- the red and peach sky coupled with the stark indigo-blacks makes this grey-teal appear to be greener than it is.)
If I wanted to, I probably could have pulled off the foreground with even fewer tones-- Saguaros are very recognizable and you need only a silhouette against a red sky to know "ah! that's a cactus, this is a desert." Either way, the foreground is so simple because the real focus of this painting was the sky and clouds, where I allowed myself to use the largest number of discrete colors (something like 8+ different colors, running from this periwinkle blue, to mahogany, to peach, to gold.) I'm sure there's a word for this concept, but clustering contrast, detail, and (in my case) the greatest variations of color in my palette creates strong visual interest, and you can use this strategically to draw attention to the focal point of your image.
I think that starting out, it's an awesome idea to pull up your own photography, or some creative commons works that really capture those limited palettes and color-pick to see how these different colors interact. There's also color palette generators out there that generate very limited palettes of 5 or so different colors... You can challenge yourself to see how well you can capture a character's design in a dramatically different palette or lighting, or how few colors you can use before you start to lose their color integrity. I find these palettes take out a lot of the guess-work involved in colorpicking, but they allow you to really experiment with how different colors act when they meet, and how distributing those colors changes the way a picture feels.
Color is weird, and probably the most "fake" thing about visual art, haha. I feel like NOTHING acts the way you think it should, at least until you try it out and begin to form that intuition for it. Either way, I've gone on long enough-- Thank you for asking, and godspeed with your new piece!!
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I do appreciate the time and effort spent on your response. I found your personal perspective more valuable than I would have had I just googled tips on color fundamentals.
Up until now I had merely taken a detached approach to coloring my art, taking the path of least resistance so to speak by throwing the whole color gamut at it. I can see how more often than not that would lead to diluting the message I'd try to portray.
I'll follow your suggestion about using a color palette generator. I used that once on a birthday card I made for a family member and was pleased with how much more cohesive the design turned out.
Thank you for the kind words of encouragement, this time I'll try to challenge myself by choosing a limited palette of 8 mostly earth tones centered on the color red and paying more attention to emotional intent.
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Hey I'm really happy to hear that, and best of luck!! funny enough, the way I color often leaves me daunted when it comes to approaching scenes that would realistically call for a very large portion of the color wheel, like urban scenes in plain daylight, so more power to you having learned color that way! above all, I hope you have fun with it!
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UGH i love the desert museum.... theyre having an event this weekend about native insects and i dont think i can make it which makes me saaaad
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NOOO...! that sounds so badass, especially with the kind of bleak odds insect populations are facing rn :^(
god what I'd give to within reasonable driving distance of the museum, though. It's tantalizingly close and yet juuuust out of reach. Really awesome thing to have in your backyard!
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YEA.... they always do a lot of these sort of educational events especially for younger people which is really important i feel
its really wild tho like!!! i live pretty central in the city but just 30-40 minutes out east or west you have the two sides of the saguaro national forest flanking the city and ofc the desert museum itself. its really not that far from our backyards at all
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This scene is stunning, and I love the contrast!
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You did such an incredible job with this greenhouse banner. What an incredible piece. It really captures how complex and huge and beautiful the sky is in those regions, and the unique silhouettes of the cacti and the mountains. Amazing amazing job!
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Thank you!! There's something really significant to me about being able to have visual contact with the horizon and the sky at all times in open areas, like grasslands, shields, oceans, deserts, and so forth-- the sky becomes sort of your anchor. If nothing else it makes for a fun composition!
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Oh gosh that's lovely. They made a great decision approaching you for this kind of art! It's always obvious how much you love the places you draw.
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OTL it blew me away haha, just the thought of someone thinking "we need desert art" and going "oh lore?" But anyway, thank you so much! really all I want is for that feeling to come across ;_;
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in this house we love and appreciate a cloud >:^) thank you!!
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I'm a sucker for both clouds and western themes. So this is a nice double whammy for me
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I'm thrilled to hear it!! Thank you!
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