This week I studied colour by using digital tools to paint photos I took of powerlines. I experimented with different mixed-media but mostly watercolour.

The first painting I made was a monochromatic blue version of a photo I took at dusk. After using Illustrator's 'Image Trace' feature to separate the tones into four distinct shapes for painting. The two background clouds were painted with watercolour, and the powerpoles were drawn with Copic markers. I used two different Copic colours to depict distance between the two poles.

For the second painting, I used a higher number of colours with warmer values. Because the black watercolour was not very strong, I used fineliners and a thick sharpie to add some darker details. 

This process of posterising my photos before painting opened my eyes to a new method of image production that could actually be useful for me. The 'Image Trace' function of illustrator allows the computer to split the image into basic colours for me, and from there I can use these tones as a starting point for my artwork. I think this is helpful because my eyes aren't as good as Illustrator's algorithm. Due to the natural defects of the watercolour paints as I laid them down, I wasn't able to get clean shapes like my traced image, but this helped blur the lines and improve the realism of the painting. If I were to do this again, I would be more careful and spend more time making it neater.