Colorado Color Field

Colorado Color Field, a photo by randubnick on Flickr.

This is a digital sketch that I drew tonight using Painter's digital pastel. I was drawing from imagination, inspired by memories of the mountains of Colorado, my home state. I started with layered silhouettes of mountains, and worked with colors that make me think of Colorado. I kept the colors fairly flat, and didn't use modeling. Then I decided to outline the mountain shapes, just a little at first. I found myself remembering doing color field painting in my college art classes in Pueblo, and then later at the University of Colorado at Boulder. (Color field painting is very flat with lots of play with color theory.) I still admire color field painting, and learned a lot from Professor Daigle, who taught me to do it, but I used to paint big canvases on the floor, on my hands and knees. These days, if I am going to do color field paintings at all, it is going to be on the computer! As I thought about all this, I decided to call this image "Colorado Color Field" and that made me smile again. I also created a posterized version of this image, which I plan to post tomorrow.