A History of Art part 67

It's too soon to start coloring my new prints, but not too soon to start thinking about color. So I went up to the Studio for a few hours in the afternoon to do that. The first question might be why I want to color this in the first place. It looks pretty nice as is, but it's not complete. It's cut for coloring. I prefer my black and white prints to have interesting compositions with masses of black, white, and gray, like the print on the right in the top photo. By comparison, my new print (on the left) is mostly just black line and feels incomplete. However, I hope that I can achieve my usual balance of value shapes through the use of local color throughout the composition. And I'll get all the other benefits of using color as well.

I started out by testing my new watercolors, some of which may be used in the basic palette. I figure that a print this large and this complicated will only work in color if the bulk of it is variations on a few basic colors. Since my starting point for this piece was one of Bruegel's Tower of Babel paintings, I decided to start there. Mixing colors old and new, I came up with a hue that closely resembles the light colored stone that makes up most of Bruegel's tower. I'll use it throughout the structure, tinting it as needed to be different kinds of stone, wood, etc. I also looked at blues, since there is a lot of sky in the print. I had brought an old photo album with me, so I devoted time to mixing colors of some specific objects from my past that appear in my tower. I brought my color mixes home to consider over the next few days. Unless I change my mind, I'll start with some of these the next time I'm in the Studio, and see what happens from there.