Nancy Freeman Studio | Chromatic Fanatic
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The Yellows are Finished!

12/29/2013

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The Yellows!
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Too many yellows!!
The yellows are finished, finally. Whew, what a process!

Yellows are always problematic because at full saturation it is at a value nine, very high, and has nowhere to go in the value scale when white is added. Very top heavy. Messes up all the color charts.
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The Yellows!
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Cabbage of the Day

12/27/2013

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Two new Cabbage Cortex images.
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My Favorites ... the Blues

12/18/2013

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YellowGreen-Green grid. BlueGreen (Cyan)-Blue grid.
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Greens and Blues
Blue Day

The blues and greens are my favorites in general. Intense blues make me very happy, and are probably why I'm an artist.

Four columns finished, two more to go!

I need some more turquoises.
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It's Green day!

12/17/2013

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Yellow-Green to Green range, taken in ambient light. This photo is more accurate.
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Same pastels, rotated a quarter turn. taken under a bright easel light. A good reminder that photos can tell all kinds of tales, and so can light.
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The Great Square Box Renovation Project of 2013

12/14/2013

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Sorting pastels ... this is the hard part

This is my most indulgent box of pastels. It consists of nothing but square or rectangular shaped colors, which I prefer for the straight edges. It was too full, and I couldn't find anything. Then I just had to treat myself to a nice set of Terry Ludwig pastels, which are very soft and a perfect size and shape.
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On the left are some of the new pastels to add in. In the middle is part of the purple-to-red range.

In back are the grids for testing the colors. As long as I'm going to all this work I may as well make art , too. I've been obsessively making color grids since college.
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This is the red-to-orange range, roughly sorted into values. You can see the little squares in the tray where they have to go. Looks like about three times as many pastel as there is space. Ugh.
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Two finished grids. For some reason these really appeal to me.
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And the two finished columns that correspond to them. Whew! Four to go...
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Two New sets of Pastels - Great American Pastel review

12/12/2013

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Great American "Outdoor Assortment" 1/2 stick set
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Great American "On the Terrace" 1/2 stick set
For a little present to myself, I invested in two 60 piece half stick sets of Great American pastels. I'm a big fan of the recent trend toward half stick sets. It saves a lot of time unwrapping and breaking the pastel sticks, and half is plenty for most colors.

Great American pastels are very, very soft, and come in square sticks, which are particularly handy. I had a fair number of them already, but they came out with these new sets with excellent color selections. I surely do not need any more pastels, but it's like getting a brand new set of 64 colors of crayons as a kid.

The packaging was about the best I've seen. The bottom part of the boxes are made of something like balsa wood, very sturdy, and there was plenty of foam under, over, and all around. They also included color charts for you to fill in for color identification, very useful. The pictures show the sets with color charts filled in.

First the good news. The color selections are indeed luscious, with a full range of hues, values and saturations. The size is actually more than half stick size, more like two-third stick size, which is about right.

The bad news, which isn't all that bad, is that a few of the colors were oddly and unpleasantly hard, which was quite unexpected. There were only four of them out of the 120 new sticks though, so maybe they had a bad batch of something.

Next step: to integrate them into The Square Set.
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I actually cleaned out my studio pastel set ...

12/11/2013

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...I actually cleaned my studio pastel set ...

This is the second largest set I work with, after the Wow Box. In the heat of battle the colors get all mixed around and covered with dust, so it's always a bit of a chore to restore it to order.  Following the good example of one of my talented friends, I even cleaned [most] of them. I'm liking it much more now, and it will last for awhile at least.

I designed the trays and they fit in a drawer under the big work table when not in use. This set doesn't travel.
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Studio pastel set
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Cabbage of the Day - Bed Head

12/9/2013

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Bed Head
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Here's the original photo.
"Bed Head"

I found this huge cabbage plant happily growing in a big garden in the Northern Neck of Virginia.
The plant is at least twice as big as any of the decorative cabbages or kale I've grown, and is the first work I've done with a whole head.

Camera360 photo,
with about an hour of work with the filters and controls. It might become a painting.
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    About the Artist

    Nancy Freeman has a decades-long fascination with digital art which she supports by painting portraits and teaching various art subjects. Right now she devotes most of her creative time to digital art because it's so satisfying.

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