great fun! well done.

here's a palette i did about mona lisa's smile (you have to read the description).

i was particularly inspired by your palette at the top of the blog. looks like mine. i never clean it. i just keep adding more paint on top. eventually i peel it off (my palette is glass) and hang it up.

Those are wonderful palettes up there. I did make a pilgrimage to see Starry Night. It's a very large and striking canvas. On the other hand, there's Mark Rothko. It must be art for art's sake, since the U.S. Postal Service considered one of his items as one of the 30 great paintings of the last 300 years. (See the illustration of the painting in the palette.)

I actually like Rothko's paintings. I think they are simple and the color really gets a chance to shine... and I'm all about colors getting the spotlight!

Here's a couple of my favourite paintings.
Udnie by Francis Picabia


Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp


Studies of the Human Body by Francis Bacon


I've got several more, but I'll just tag them.

Great article by the way, this is my favourite so far. But then again I'm biased.

:P

This is my version of the Birth of Venus:

So many favorite Masters - so I closed my eyes and just picked one for now. *s* This is a palette that I did a couple of weeks ago.. a tribute to the Czech artist, Alphons Mucha. A brilliant designer as well as artist, Mucha adopted a style that most people think of as *Art Nouveau* - however, originally it was referred to as *Le style Mucha*. I think it's interesting to note that Mucha very much disliked the term *Art-Nouveau* because he felt that all art was eternal and never just *nouveau*. He tried unsuccessfully to distance himself from that label for most of his career.
The painting that inspired the palette.
The palette:

okay. my homage de duchamp:



and william bradford:

the mucha palette made me think of beardsley:

i adore this article! I really love Botticelli's works, even though a lot of it is religious depictions. Here's my version of The Birth of Venus:

Why are we even knocking ourselves out with all of these colors. A link in this palette reports on a minimalist exhibit at the Guggenheim. A 4' x 8' sheet of plywood at the High Museum in Atlanta was almost tossed out until it was realized that that was the "art".

hahaha, great one restof.

It can't be THAT great. "The Age Of Minimalism" got 4 votes so far, but only averages 6.50. HAH!

Google images for "Rauschenberg white" to see both the simplistic three panel white painting that anyone could do and the highly complex seven panel white painting that demands an exceptional degree of art education to contemplate. True minimalism has no need for more than one color.



The link illustration in this palette is larger and used for color picking here. The gaffers who set up the lights for the installation may have ruined the work by uneven illustration of panels one and three.

Oh, how I love this. I did a painting of portions of Starry Night, The Scream, and Harmony in Red when I was in middle school.

I wish I could find it. :-\

@retsof -- it's a fairly safe bet that if you like the drama of a van gogh, you're gonna find rothko a little bit enigmatic. but he's far from banal. rothko's a painter's painter -- the story's in the technique.

One of many favorites is Jan Van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding Portrait.

Growing up and even into adulthood, I never dreamed that I would actually get to stand in front of painting created by one of the great masters I had studied about. So in October 2004 when we went to Edinburgh and visited the National Gallery of Scotland, it was almost surreal for me - definitely a life-changing moment. Seeing my first Vermeer was a very emotional experience - then to discover that it was considered the earliest of his works that could be found *and* that it was of a religious theme (which was rare for him) - let's just say that that over 5' painting seemed to be 3 stories high at the time. :o) As I looked for a link for the painting to post here, I realized how the colors were very different according to the site that housed the image. So, in trying to stay as true as possible to the original, I chose the one that matched it best. Wish I could've captured more of the glow and warmth in the original - staying within the 5 colors is tough sometimes! *s*

The painting: Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (link for the painting)

The palette:

Simplemente genial. Ahora toca combinar los de la misma manera que en el cuedro, que me parece a mi que va ser algo difícil.

Saludos desde España.

for any Photoshop CS users here, this reminded me of a recent photography adjustment technique that lets you effortlessly (from a technical point of view anyway) apply the colors from a classical painting to your own photos:
http://www.unfocusedbrain.com/projects/match_color/

Wonderful Post. It is interesting that early artists struggle with a limited number of pigments, yet created very moving and emotive work. I am beginning to belive that powerful emotive work normally is limited in colors. You will see that latter artists used brighter and more saturated colors and they have a completely different feel.

None of these artists apear to have used the color wheel to help them select colors. their color schemes differ from picture to picture and also depend on the pigments that were available at that time. But since the old master took months and months to paint, they must have spent a lot of time making color decisions.

Extracting colors from pictures also depends on how you do it, there are many online facilities for this. www.pic2color.com is one of them. You can upload your picture and extract color schemes.

Great post. It's great to see it demonstrated how raw colours can be transformed through the eyes of a genius into a work of art. It is my experience that one of the truely rare qualities in a great artist is to see the actual colour of their environment. Whilst we may just see blues and whites in the sky, they see a whole spectrum of colours and have the ability to bring that alive.

the best collection!!!

beautiful , magnificent

I do this based in Piet Mondrian

INSPIRING...

I think the mood/style of the painters shows pretty strongly from the colors that he/she uses, and this just makes it even more obvious. I think Dali's Persistance of Memory is a little off in the yellow/orange, but it's nice to compare them all to eachother. Andy Warhol stands out and is recognizable even in a small color sample. Great post.

Oh, how I love this. I did a painting of portions of Starry Night, The Scream, and Harmony in Red when I was in middle school.

its very good color platte thank.

These are beautiful color schemes but will people choose them for inside their homes? Will they be too vivid? I choose my color scheme inspirations from just about any photograph in magazines. If the colors look good in the photograph, they will look good on your walls. I have some samples on my website at: www.decoratingbydonna.com

Wow, breaking down the famous paintings by color really shows why these are such masterpieces. The colors just flow so well together.