Weird Wednesdays Instalment 3: Green
It’s another instalment of Weird Wednesdays, a blog about some varied inspirations that can be found for creating artwork. Because today is St. Patrick’s Day we will talk about a very inspiring colour that encompasses some of my favourite subjects: the colour green. How many hues and shades of green are there? The human eye reportedly can distinguish a few hundred hues of each colour, and green is one of the most recognizable.
The colour green is often associated with nature and is more often than not a peaceful and refreshing colour. Some obvious sources of green inspiration comes from plants and foliage, and it is fun to paint and draw various plant life. The term plant life is used broadly here, sometimes it can be great fun to draw or paint plants that exist only in your imagination, perhaps what a plant might look like on another planet, or in another dimension or from a description in some fiction. Here is an example of a simple painting that illustrates some 2 dimensional succulents that uses different shades of green that stand out on a black background:
Some other great examples of green in nature are to be found in creatures like reptiles, amphibians, and insects. Even if you are not a fan of these creatures in your everyday life, they do make excellent subjects for artwork and can inspire some science fiction type creations as well. Frogs come in a variety of colours and some of the green ones are the coolest. Here I am including an artwork inspired by a photo of a tree frog:
There are some interesting fictional characters and creatures that are various hues of green. Some examples include Oscar the grouch, Marvin the Martian, Kermit the Frog, Leprechauns, aliens, Godzilla and the list goes on. Fan art has reached new heights due to websites like deviantart.com and social media platforms like Instagram and Tumblr. It’s great if you can reinterpret popular characters and creatures in your own style. Some might say that fan art is not original. I say that it is, if it’s your own interpretation and/or uses your own style. Here is an example of Oscar the grouch done as a digital drawing that has a different style and texture than the original muppet but is still easily recognizable as Oscar:
Today this blog has only focused on a few of the limitless possibilities for artwork using the colour green. We have only discussed some subjects that are often associated with green, and I would like to note that subjects are not so limited and any subject can be any colour that you wish it to be. Portraits of people often have green tones or hues as well as anything that is portrayed as realistic. And as always, with abstract art it is impossible to name all of the possibilities there. Watch for next Wednesday’s post one week from today where we might go further down that rabbit hole. Ciao.