Gordons art magazine
Achieving clear and beautiful colours
November 9th 1998
I am often asked what colours should be used for gum trees, which blue for water, or when I am doing a demonstration, I am asked what colours did I use there.
This assumes that there are set colour palettes for each subject.
While it is good to have an extensive knowledge of how to mix colours and to combine them to achieve the results you desire, looking for colour formulas to rely on can end up stifling your painting. You can end up painting the sky the same blue for the next ten years regardless of what sort of day it is, and the painting then lacks mood, which is a vital ingredient in any good painting.
If we are to have mood, which can only be obtained by good colour, composition, and value, the first thing we must do before we start painting is to observe your subject matter. Spend some time defining what the centre of interest is and the mood you wish to convey to the viewer. By this I don’t mean you must faithfully copy what is before you, for instance, for the sake of the composition you might move a tree or two, or you could change the weather to enhance the subject matter. But this can only be achieved by observation, so painting formulas are not a very good alternative and in fact they stop your development as a painter.
My advice is to decide what overall colour scheme suits what you want to say in your picture, and then test your colours on a similar spare piece of paper. This will insure the colour is what you want and it is the correct value, and you will see how it will look next to the other colours.
Avoid “mud” by thinking out your paint mix before mixing. I find it useful to limit my colours to two or three for mixing. For example, if you want a grayed yellow green, and you use lemon yellow and a little cerulean blue with a touch of its complement violet, you have used four colours because violet contains red and blue. This reduces your chance of a clear colour. Instead, if you use a raw sienna, which is already a grayed yellow and a small amount of viridian, you can get a good clean result with only two colours
When you want to gray a primary colour use it’s complimentary. I find the best results are had when you use the warm and cool temperature colours. To gray a cool yellow like lemon, use a mix of alizarin crimson (cool) and ultramarine blue (blue) and keep p it on the warm side to stop the yellow sliding towards green. For cadmium yellow keep it on the cool (blue) side, you only need a touch to get the results you require this comes with practice. You can gray all the primary colours by this method.
A very good book on colours is “Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green” by Michael Wilcox. It explains and demystifies colour mixing.
In the next article I will continue on this subject, and also be writing about changing the mood by changing the colour.
Achieving clear and beautiful colours
November 9th 1998
I am often asked what colours should be used for gum trees, which blue for water, or when I am doing a demonstration, I am asked what colours did I use there.
This assumes that there are set colour palettes for each subject.
While it is good to have an extensive knowledge of how to mix colours and to combine them to achieve the results you desire, looking for colour formulas to rely on can end up stifling your painting. You can end up painting the sky the same blue for the next ten years regardless of what sort of day it is, and the painting then lacks mood, which is a vital ingredient in any good painting.
If we are to have mood, which can only be obtained by good colour, composition, and value, the first thing we must do before we start painting is to observe your subject matter. Spend some time defining what the centre of interest is and the mood you wish to convey to the viewer. By this I don’t mean you must faithfully copy what is before you, for instance, for the sake of the composition you might move a tree or two, or you could change the weather to enhance the subject matter. But this can only be achieved by observation, so painting formulas are not a very good alternative and in fact they stop your development as a painter.
My advice is to decide what overall colour scheme suits what you want to say in your picture, and then test your colours on a similar spare piece of paper. This will insure the colour is what you want and it is the correct value, and you will see how it will look next to the other colours.
Avoid “mud” by thinking out your paint mix before mixing. I find it useful to limit my colours to two or three for mixing. For example, if you want a grayed yellow green, and you use lemon yellow and a little cerulean blue with a touch of its complement violet, you have used four colours because violet contains red and blue. This reduces your chance of a clear colour. Instead, if you use a raw sienna, which is already a grayed yellow and a small amount of viridian, you can get a good clean result with only two colours
When you want to gray a primary colour use it’s complimentary. I find the best results are had when you use the warm and cool temperature colours. To gray a cool yellow like lemon, use a mix of alizarin crimson (cool) and ultramarine blue (blue) and keep p it on the warm side to stop the yellow sliding towards green. For cadmium yellow keep it on the cool (blue) side, you only need a touch to get the results you require this comes with practice. You can gray all the primary colours by this method.
A very good book on colours is “Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green” by Michael Wilcox. It explains and demystifies colour mixing.
In the next article I will continue on this subject, and also be writing about changing the mood by changing the colour.
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