Matthew Laurence

In this latest post, I am providing some further insights into the process of completing a work within the ‘Urban Jungle‘ series. This post will focus a bit on the interactions of color through the image element and the background. Below is the image element design on it’s own.

I first started with adding a toned down acrylic field of green and then added a layer of blue with a range of airbrush stencil elements to create an atmosphere and depth-of-field to the background. In the second image, you can see that I then added a primary yellow on top of the work followed by some deep blues and a splatter of red to help direct the eye.

Looking at the image above, I felt that the background was still too busy and conflicting with the image element. I highlighted the edges of the image element with more yellow to try to separate the two fields. I wasn’t sure it was working, so at this point I needed another opinion on the work and the direction it should take.

I would like to give a shout out and thanks to an amazing artist, colleague, and friend; Jeff Pabotoy as a sound board and critical eye in this work. This work is an example to the benefit in having a community of peers to bounce off ideas/concepts to your work. As you can see from the direction of the background to the work with the image element, the color scheme had too much of an analogous connection and not enough of a contrast. Right away he noticed that lack of contrast and separation between the two and something needed to change.

The several of the previous pieces I was using a range of metallic colors and earth tones to the backgrounds and thought this would be a fitting use as well. To add further contrast and compliment the image element i wanted to go with something warmer towards the reds and chose a copper/gold value.

As you can see the final work provides that separation between the image element and background. There are still are traces of the yellow peeking through in various areas of the work to motivate the eye to explore.