Adding colour back into my experiments

After reaching the point of having several different monochrome experiments using different mediums, textures, inspirations and techniques, I felt that the pieces mostly lacked one thing - a focal point. Considering this I looked back on Richter's work and realised quite a few of his compositions involve simples shades or hues with one palette highlight, such as this one below.

This piece shows layers of colour over each other and the top coat is a grey/white tinge throughout and the only strong specific colour that shines through is a highlight of red.

Due to the idea of using colour again, I looked back on my previous experiments and I thought the best way to gradually recombine colour with monochrome was to print one of my colour experiments onto acetate and use that over my current marks in order to get an idea of what it would like.

This is the piece of colour acetate I printed which I did on size A4.

All the photographs that are above show just a few of the ones I took of the colour acetate over the top of my mark making experiments. One of my favourites is the very last one because it contains a bright white background in the centre to enhance the vibrant colours on the acetate. As well as various black marks using acrylic paint and dry mediums - this creates the contrast.

After this is then looked into photographing the acetate over other surfaces, objects and people to see if anything else caught my eye that I could add into my work. I creating a contact sheet with all the photos I had taken as well as six specific ones that I talked about in more detail - these are in my evidence folder.

Doing this practical helped me to also get an insight of how the colour will look over a photograph as that is what I am finally working towards. Concluding from this I found that the colours didn't show up well on the Fogo island photographs as they are quite dark so I plan to either edit the photo to lighten it or use more intense pigmented colours.

Taking all this into consideration I began to add ready mix coloured paints to my monochrome experiments:

I firstly created these pieces where I attempted to add just small aspects of colour just to ease it into the monochrome. The one just above is exactly what I was aiming for, perfect monochrome contrast with a highlight of red colour creating a focal point.

 On the left was when I began using masses more of colour then previously with a pure white emulsion background to enhance the hues. I combined reds and yellows here which I learnt from my past experiments that they worked really well together and they also create a firey lava aspect, relating directly back to my theme of Fogo Islands volcanic eruption.

I continued to do this here, except I added more black for contrast and definition.