(image via here.)
by Hervé Tullet (Chronicle Books, 2014)
First of all. Welcome to the new Design of the Picture Book! I’m super excited to feature this particular book as the first spot in my face-lifted blog–its heart and soul of art and play is exactly what I think these new digs represent.
Do you see? The logo! The colors! The Book Party? THE BOOK PARTY?!! (If you are in a reader, click over and see all the goodies. And for the love, please join the Book Party. I mean really.)
Super huge thanks to Sara Jensen for, well, everything. (#taken)
It’s here. This highly anticipated follow up to the smash hit Press Here is muddled-up fun and completely magical.
Remember those rolls of endless butcher paper and squishing your fingers into as many paint puddles as possible? That’s what this book is. It’s a lesson in color mixing wrapped up in a hefty dose of play.
Slam the book together so the yellow and blue make green. Shake it on its side and watch purple drips racing off the page. What happens when you add some white? Or black? Or stick your hand right in the middle of the mess?
It’s a color theory primer and an invitation to get dirty. And isn’t that the best kind of creating?
I’m a grownup. I get the gig here. And still I looked at my palm when I flipped the last page of this book, sure it would be dripping with paint.
Welcome back to childhood. It’s good here.
Want to win a children’s painting studio worth $500? Check out the details here, and tweet away using #MixItUpBook!
P.S – If you need more Hervé Tullet (and the answer is probably yes, yes you do) check out this other experiential art book for tiny, creative minds.
I received this book from the publisher (right back atcha, #chroniclecrush!), but opinions are all mine.
On this lovely afternoon, I was able to spend time painting. I realized that the little still life I just painted was OK, but...something about it isn't sitting well with me. I'm happy to be more comfortable working with acrylic paint, but it's still falling flat. That contrast that I like to emphasize just wasn't there once the colors dried. Also, I wanted to try something a little looser now that I'd solved the question of colors and mixing. So, I decided to try it again from a slightly different angle.
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| First paint (left) and today's painting (right) |
I definitely like the 2nd one better - it has a greater level of contrast and it is slightly looser (although I think total reckless abandon just isn't how I was created to paint). There's still a little tweaking that I'll do, but it shouldn't change too drastically from this. One thing that I thought about while painting was how much easier color mixing has become. In the early days of painting, color mixing was a little confusing - sort of hit or miss. But now, I have a better sense of whether I should add a blue, a brown, or a black for a shadow; whether I should add a white, a yellow, an ochre, or some other color for a highlight. I'm actually quite happy with my painting now - I want to have one foot in the natural world and one foot in the expressive without swinging too far one way or another...at least for now.
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| This doesn't exactly accurately represent the saturation of some of the colors, but it's close... |
I've been watching some art programs on the Ovation channel lately and I had to pause one episode of Art in Progress to write down a quote. The show focused on the artist
Donald Sultan - I was not particularly familiar with his work and I liked it to some degree, although it was a bit to conceptual for my tastes (a topic for another time). But, he said something that really struck a chord in me as I so often "overthink" things.
"One of the mainstays of making art is that you don't think of new ideas - you discover them. So, that's why you have to work all the time. If you go out and just lie around and start thinking and waiting, you know nothing is ever gonna happen. And, the longer you wait, the more you realize that when you come back to it, you're right back where you were. You're not any further along even though you thought and thought and thought - you didn't really go anywhere." Donald Sultan
I appreciated this thought since I often like to spend time - too much time - thinking about what I want to do. And, sometimes it's paralyzing.
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