Cowrie Shell
Cowrie Shell
Today’s painting is based on a shell my uncle found in Kenting, Taiwan. Literally the reason I know what kind of shell this is, is because of Animal Crossing: New Horizons and picking up a bajillion of these on the shore in the game. And then I got one in real life! How cool is that?
Anyways, isn’t it wonderful how nature came up with this splendid complementary color palette? Here I’ve got titanium white, yellow ochre, cobalt violet, ultramarine violet.
I mixed and extended these base colors with white. Also added a bit of the yellow ochre to the purple mixtures to help tone down the brightness. I learned this trick from Think Big, Paint Small (see my Tiny Paintings blog post).
I decided to try an overhead view and mostly forgo a background. I really struggle with backgrounds and remembering there is a background and the fact it’s better to choose the background color(s) AND paint the background first!
Anyways…
For the shadow, instead of a grey, I tried a lighter version of one of the purples. This was something we’d do in digital product design. For example, if you had a blue button, you wouldn’t want to use a black or grey drop shadow, but rather the same blue and tweak the opacity a bit (as described in this article). This looks less harsh and feels more lively and harmonious. I like experimenting with this idea in paintings as well so I’ll likely play around with it more in the future.
