Collaborations - Three-Tone Abstractions

Molly's three-tone paint-by-number study: Color 1= yellow, color 2= blue, color 3 = magenta

I've been trying out the three-tone - paint-by-number exercises with friends and am pretty excited about the results. During a ladies Mt. bike weekend in VT, we spent a rainy evening painting together, filling in shapes on our respective Mylar tiles to make a larger composition. I repurposed the base design outlines I used for the Mylar black and white mobile, which is an abstraction of one of my paintings completed last December. To set them up for this exercise, I had prenumbered the source sheets and created outlines for them on the untreated Mylar with a medium grey sharpie. While my friends worked, I finished up painting the black and white and grey versions for my my Mylar mobile that I would submit as part of a gallery application that Sunday after our trip (big news, I got in!)

Given the full range of color options, my friends each selected their own color palette with no input from me. I merely opened up a large box of paint pens with the simple instructions: fill in the numbered and pre-outlined shapes accordingly by assigning areas labeled as 1= with a light color, 2= a medium color, and 3= a dark color.

Three- tone translation by my friend Sabrina. She selected complementary colors 1= blue, 2=green, 3=orange

Finished Three- tone translation by my friend Sabrina. She selected complementary colors 1= blue, 2=green, 3=orange

I am so proud of them both! Painting didn't come naturally to either of them, so this was a stretch to convince them at first. The color selection was 100% their own choosing and am impressed with their color sensibility. Sabrina selected for colors: 1= light blue, 2= middle green, and 3= orange. The complementary orange and green work well together and the blue helps soften their differences. The orange and green flip forward and back as my eye moves around the image and shapes. The imagery is both novel and familiar at the same time.

Molly selected colors 1= yellow, 2= light blue, 3= magenta. The use of yellow as the lightest color works quite well and highlights the light within the abstraction. The contrasting magenta really reads as dark if we look at this with our black and white vision, forgetting color for the moment. The strength of the magenta reads through and the light blue fades to the background. The contrast between the magenta and yellow really hold this together, with the blue acting as the visual "glue."

At one point in the evening massive thunderstorms rolled through and the wind launched some of the magenta tiles across the table to onto my black and white ones. We moved everything inside and continued to paint. I did my best to salvage the pinked up tile of my set of 36, and painted over the marks, but to this day you can see just a hint of magenta flecks in a few of my Mylar black and white tiles- I think I'll leave them to remember the fun of sharing this experience with two friends.

The best part about this exercise- these tiles are like friendship bracelets. They can combine to make one larger composition even though they each possess different color schemes. We all now have artwork in our homes from the same source abstraction, and we each painted these independently together one early summer weekend in May. Back at home, I placed images of the two studies side by side in Photoshop to show how the two pieces could be combined.

Photoshop mockup of the two studies side by side making a larger composition