The School of Athens, (1509) Raphael Sanzio

Our picture study this week was The School of Athens, which is such a full and fascinating picture.

I particularly like this part of the painting which depicts Euclid, which I have used before in a elementary geometry post.

"Raphael practiced the sfumato style of painting used in the Renaissance. This style uses soft edges. You can use soft edges when mixing colors." -Artistic Pursuits

Now that we had experienced the color wheel, I thought we would broaden out to other color mixing concepts. If a color is made lighter by adding white, the result is called a tint. If black is added, the darker version is called a shade. And if gray is added, the result is a different tone.

We decided to work with tints and sfumato.

First we took the primary colors and kept adding white a little at a time so that we could see the various tints that the primary colors could have.



The top is another exercise in blending colors. You begin with green and end up with orange.



We then took tints of each of them and made a sfumato sky.

This will be a background for a future painting.