Online Art Mini Lesson 6
An Introduction to MOOD

An Online Art Lesson from Interactive Art School. This and the other Online Art Lessons are for your enjoyment and a hint of what you will receive in the for-profit 6 Lesson/10 Textbook/6 Personal Critique Full Art Course

MOOD is the underlying structure of things that we can understand and use to create realistic objects in our paintings and drawings.

Let's start the MOOD discussion with a landscape painting:

This page a sample of the Interactive Art Schools ON-THE-WEB teaching. One of the school's tools is it's unique use of WEB & computer variations which can make principles clearer than a flat printed textbook or sketches in chalk on a blackboard. So we supplement the course text books with on-the-web lessons and lesson supplements like this (All registered students get 10 text books in their Sign Up Kit).

Landscape MOOD INDEX

Click on the names above and below the thumbnails to see a POP-UP page about each thumbnail and how their "MOOD" is achieved.

1 Original                 2. Brighter                3 Even Brighter      4. More Blue  
 

MOOD is applied to all subjects

Below mood shifts are effected by color and value selections in a still life.

1. Original oil 2. Darker mood* 3. Lighter, brighter mood**

4. "Hotter"(red shift)*** 5. More dramatic**** 6. Mood or local color? *****

* Apple #2. The overall mood is darker and more mysterious than the original #1 apple - achieved by mixing darker colors and selecting from the darker pools of paint within your mixtures on your palette.

** Apple # 3 is lighter and brighter than the original apple (#1 above) -this is achieved by using more of the lighter color mixtures and more of the stronger colors in the selections form your mixtures on your palette.

*** Apple # 4 has an even "hotter" mood - with more of the brighter, more intense hotter reds (like Cadmium Red) selected to make mixtures and the selection of the hotter areas of the mixtures on your palette.

**** Apple # 5 has a more DRAMATIC mood, achieved by slecting more dramatic shifts from light areas to dark areas - this MOOD sift is achieved mre in the selection of VALUES (lightenss or darkness) of the colors selected, than in the choice of chromatic values (richness, bightness of color).

***** Apple # 5 shifts color over to a yellow apple - this is not necessarily a MOOD shift, but another lesson we will be posting to this site soon - the issue of LOCAL COLOR. This apple is a YELLOWER apple - it has less red and more yellow in it's skin coloration. An artists must understand many principles underlying objects - their LOCAL COLOR, their underlying FORM as well as the mood an artist wishes to convey. (See the two Online Lessons on FORM by clicking on the links below):

Online Art Lesson 2: An introduction to FORM in painting

Online Art Lesson 3: A more advanced FORM lesson

All the above is done in by scanning one of my oil paintings (the original apple above) and then I manipulated that apple in a computer graphics program to show the underlying principles of mood.

End of Online "Lesson # 6 MOOD" on this WEB site

To sign up for the full course with personalized CRITIQUES, click here.

© 2009 Barry Waldman

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