COLORING: HUGH FLEMING PART 1

This begins my very long look into how to approach color strategies for painting once the pencil drawing is done for a montage. There are many concepts I have to learn and one I wanted to start with that caught my eye was what made Hugh Fleming’s work so unique and different from Struzan and Chorney.

HARMONY

The first strategy is color harmony. Hugh Fleming’s pieces largely live in intense contrasts between warm and cool. For example, in the montage below, every character below has some kind of a blue outline.

One thing I also noticed is how Fleming pushing his neutrals to blue to strengthen the color temperature contrast. Like in Poe’s white vest:

The same is true for pushing blue into neutrals into Hans’s black and white outfit, his gray hair, and selectively into Chewbacca’s midtones. This ties every image into the same world and further makes the montage seem apparently painted/drawn.

For the last example of harmony, we see the the man on the left has cool midtones and highlights to be in harmony with his blue surroundings. The woman on the right has green shadows to be in harmony with the greener blues surrounding her.

HIERARCHY

Lastly, I noticed how Fleming sometimes separates who does and doesn’t get the color temperature contrasted face treatments. In the two montages below, he uses the intense color contrast on the largest, prominent faces - likely because the color combination is the most unnatural and and eye-grabbing.