Red Cat in the Window
Digital © 2011 Margaret Sloan

I’ve been absent from this blog for while. I’ve been taking classes and working, not just at the day job, but at the easel, painting  and coloring in the early mornings before work, in the evenings when I can, and on weekends. I’ve been on a tear-I love that feeling of something burning brightly in my brain as I work.

This early morning work  makes it a little hard to drag my brain out of colorlandia when it’s time to go out to fight the commuter traffic, but it makes my day sweeter to have used my morning creative-energy spurt for my own work.

The above cat is just a small digital piece (done in Adobe Illustrator) for a color theory class I. The assignment was to create the illusion of transparency using color. The colors in this piece are all made by mixing ratios of cmyk (for those who aren’t printing geeks, that means a mixture of four colors: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black). I did not use the transparency feature in Illustrator.

It was fascinating to learn how the desaturated colors could create the illusion of transparency. I’m not sure when I’ll use this technique in my own art (perhaps another Halloween series of ghostly hitchhikers?), but I was still entranced.