Apologies for the late post, I planned to post about a new piece of felt but only 1 of the photos wasn’t blurry, so I thought I’d post about Ruth’s Fauvism Challenge. To try and understand Fauvism, I thought I would try to alter some photos in the style of it. Lyn posted on the forum that she’d written these words to help her with the challenge: “Fauvist paintings have a simplified drawing and an exaggerated use of colour”
It summed up what I had been trying to achieve with the edited photos. The first one I tried had some of the bright colours, and the water ripples gave the ‘texurey’ look of the Fauvist style brush strokes, but I felt like I need to try a different photo. This is the one I started with:

And after some tweaks on Photoshop:

I tried it again with a different photo. This is the original:

I increased the brightness and saturation:

Then I simplified the colours and shapes:

This muted the colours a lot so I increased the saturation again:

I then added a few tiny lines around the boat and some colour to the water:

I then added outlines:

I feel like this last one is the starting point, rather than the finished picture. It has the simple shapes and the colour is exagerated, but more in saturation than anything. And though at first the Fauvism style seems very bright, when you really look at the paintings, they aren’t so much bright as bold. I think I will play around with some other photos, try to get ones which start simpler, but have more in the way of colour variation. One thing I did learn today, was how to pronounce ‘Fauvism’ 🙂