Henri Matisse Painting Write-Up

1. The complimentary colour scheme I chose was a purple and yellow colour scheme.  However, some of the variations of the purple were very close to a blue-violet.  The reason I chose them was that purple is a very dark colour, quite similar to black; whereas yellow is a very light colour, almost a white.  I really found it interesting that I was able to show dark and light values in my complimentary colour scheme.  I made these two colours more dominant than any other colours by making them the only colour I used for the horse, except for the hooves which were red.

2. No, I didn't use pattern in my piece to create emphasis on the focal point, instead I didn't paint my background perfectly.  The brush strokes are still visible and some areas are lighter than others.  I believe an imperfect background will get the viewers to focus more on the beauty of the horse than the background because it looks like the artist didn't spend much time on it.  Also, since my background is all orange, there is nothing special about it to get the viewer  to focus on it rather than the contrasting colours of the foreground.  I used these two techniques rather than pattern to get the viewer to focus their attention on the focal point.

3.  When transforming my original horse drawing into the style of Matisse I worked slowly and looked at different areas that could be altered easily to show more organic and rounded shapes.  Next, I found parts of the horse that were slightly detached and not close to the body, such as the head and some of the legs. Then I erased my original lines and fully detached them from the body of the horse.  After I had completed these steps, I looked at my overall sketch and made changes to any parts that I felt look un-natural.  Next, I chose my colour scheme and started painting the sheets that I would later cut out.  Once those sheets had dried, I traced the outline of the pieces I was going to cut onto them and then I cut them out with an exact-o knife.  Once I had all of my pieces cut, I double checked that they fit by placing them overtop of my sketch.  Next, I mixed an orange colour for my background and I painted the entire nutex paper orange.  Once that had dried, I traced the outline of my horse sketch onto the orange nutex paper and then glued the previously cut pieces onto the background.  With that complete, I trimmed up the edges of my painted cut outs and my masterpiece was complete!  The only real difficulty I had in the painting process was the the paper would constantly warp when I painted on it and then after the pieces dried, I would have to flatten them.  Some positive developments that I had in the process were that I learned better exact-o knife cutting techniques and I learnt that in the future, when I am cutting many small pieces and trying to compile them to make one large figure I should leave extra on my pieces and then trim them down at the end of the process.