TODAY'S FEATURED POST

Short Take: Foreground Darks


Gregory Manchess

Recently in one of my online classes for SmArt School, a few students were having trouble creating visual interest in their compositions. The pieces lacked depth. The culprit wasn’t the design of the main elements, but the distribution of values. Generally, the students think of the background as dark, but they also wanted to put their main subject in dark clothing, and all the darks in the subject were the same darks as in the…

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YESTERDAY’S POST


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Forge Ahead


Vanessa Lemen

June 19, 2025 - When I start to write these articles here on Muddy Colors, I am often stricken with this strange dichotomy of being vulnerable in the sharing of something meaningful to the world and wondering if anyone even reads these anyway. Sometimes, my anxiety is so strong that I just need to post something that will not allow these feelings to bubble up. These types of articles are usually the ones that become the sharing of a few favorite tools or a quick bullet-point of the progression of a recent piece. But most of the time, I feel it’s truly important to really try to push past the feeling I get of worry and lack of worth, anxiety and dread, and share something meaningful, something human and thoughtful. It’s important to me. And it also scares the…

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