Wish to stop a moment in time... Wish to hold on to your most special memories, literally, physically, forever. Your wish is my command.

About Me

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Las Vegas, Nevada, United States
Ciao! My name is Elisabetta Monari and I'm an artist reborner. My passion for dolls and art started in childhood, and the love for children soon after. I combined them in reborning, the art of creating still shots of infancy, tridimensional portraits achieved with many layers of translucent paint on a "doll canvas" sculpted by another artist. I'm also trying my hand at doll restoration, reborn restoration and sewing BJD outfits, for a change... this is my creative time, stay tuned for more!!! :D

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

The color theory

It helps when you need to tweak the paint job on your work to know a little of the color theory.
Basically it's the same stuff you learned during circle time in preschool, but never knew it would come in useful some day. ;)

For who was absent that day: there are three PRIMARY colors, red yellow and blue. They are actually Magenta, Cyan yellow and Cyan blue if you want precision.

Black and white are not colors, they are light saturation. Black is total lack of light, white is total light. All the colors behave differently depending on what light they are in (also your paints do, so be careful if you paint at night!).

If you mix your primary colors you obtain your SECONDARY colors:

MAGENTA + CYAN BLUE = PURPLE

MAGENTA + CYAN YELLOW = ORANGE

CYAN BLUE + CYAN YELLOW = GREEN

Now you see that every color has one opposite. That color is called its COMPLEMENTARY (not "complimentary", nothing is free here). So red and green, blue and orange, purple and yellow.
These colors tend to neutralize themselves if mixed, that's when all this babble comes in useful for us reborn artists.
When you have a weird colored kit or your paint job doesn't come out as expected (it happens to us people who mix our own colors), you just look at a good color wheel and go for the color opposite of the one you want to correct. Here is one for your reference, but you can google "color wheel" and have your pick.


Why all this? Well let's say that yesterday a very sleep deprived reborn artist decided to set aside all the good work she'd need to do and color correct a beloved baby of hers who was rather purplish. One of those reborning jobs on BB old grey vinyl of yesteryear, who never seemed to look right no matter what. Something like this:



Then during... (Matilda wasn't actually thrilled to be photographed this way!)


... and after. Can you tell the difference? 


Note to the fellow artists: you can see some of the colors I used in my plates next to Matilda, but the huge cup of tea is mandatory during this process. Being totally sleep deprived is not, but helps. ;) 

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