Outcome
Wassily Kandinsky is a Russian painter who is thought to be the pioneer of abstract modern art.
He was part of various art groups such as the Blue Rider, which focused on using properties of color, line, and composition. Kandinsky focused on analyzing color theories and form and believed that there was more to abstract art than just using abstract methods. He had skill and originality in form and content, and was a spiritual painter. He used his color theories and art techniques to create sound and reach emotion purely through natural visual and spiritual means. Essentially, he tried to paint music.
Kandinsky had synesthesia, which is a "a condition which one sees sounds as colours and hears colours and forms as sounds."
Some of his most well known works showcasing his variety:
After returning to Moscow, Kandinsky started using many geometric shapes for simplification as well as Avant-Garde style. He particularly loved circles, which he says "is the purest and most basic element of painting." To Kandinsky, circles "appear to shift when placed in tension with other forms" and were connected to the cosmos.
Several Circles is a perfect representation of how circles seem to float around in light movement, giving off a cosmic spiritual feeling and making it appear like the solar planets.
I really love this artwork because of the different ways you can see it. I see the solar system with planets everywhere with an eclipse, but I also see a bird soaring through balls of color. It really gives off this mystic feeling of serenity and calm to me, I feel like the colorful circles are floating around in space like planets in harmony. It's a very simple, minimalist work, but it gives off a lot of atmosphere.
When taking in the picture, it has an overall aesthetically pleasing calming feel to it, and then while looking more deeply into the detail of it, as your eyes scan over the circles, it gives off a sense of a floating motion. The light colorful but muted colors make the piece more serene and this might be strange but I sort of hear a light bubbly tinkling sound when I look at this piece (not sure if that's the actual intention but it's what I noticed).
On second look, I noticed a black bird shape in the background of the painting. I could be looking too much into it, but I think this reinforces the movement of the painting.
Tools: Paint Tool SAI & Laptop trackpad
Time: 1 hour
I started off laying out the circles on a gray canvas. This took the most time just figuring out the positions of the circles and also finding colors that I thought were suitable (I picked the colors by myself). They varied in size and color and transparency, so it took a lot of time. What I found particularly perplexing was when the circles overlapped, their intersection would have a color that wasn't quite the combination of the two colors, so I had to individually recolor the overlapped space.
Afterwards I added the additional effects, such as when the circles would be highlighted with another color, such as a black circle with a yellow rim on it. I also added a speckle glowing effect to the largest circle to make it stand out and "glow."
Next I added a dark "bird-like" shape in the background and added in a galaxy background to reinforce Kandinsky's cosmic effect and refined the shape of the bird to stand out more in the galaxy and finished!
I am pretty happy with the result. I kind of wish I had more than one hour because I wanted to add more textures to the circles (perhaps a moon crater effect) which could have enhanced the mystic cosmic effect. It also would have helped to use a pen tablet or maybe even a mouse because using a trackpad used up a lot of time when placing the circles, especially the really tiny ones.
I tend to be a perfectionist, so when I realized that the positions of the circles were slightly off, I went around trying to reposition a bunch of them which also probably used up a lot of time. In general I think time management is really crucial for this project since we're restricted to only one hour.
I made sure to use muted colors for a serene feeling and I wanted to make sure certain elements of the piece stood out, such as the largest circle as the "moon" and the overlapped circles and the "bird" in the background. I think the galaxy effect made it seem more cosmic and spiritual, but it detracted from the "abstract" feeling that my work had at first. Looking at the first screenshot, I can see how the colors work together already and I'm really impressed with Kandinsky's color sense.
Overall this was a really fun experience to recreate a painting :).
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