Colour Practices

“All colours are the friends of their neighbours and the lovers of their opposites.” Marc Chagall

Colour is a world unto itself and any approach to managing colour has to be rooted in both experience as well as an underlying comfort with some theory. My approach is to keep colour processes as simple as practicable. The key principles that I use throughout my art are:

Colour is fundamentally relative

Colour, compelling as it is, has no power in isolation. It takes both light and contrast with it’s surroundings to have any impact at all. The very existence of colour depends on the difference between colours. The eye compares a colour with surrounding colour. When colours are similar, contrast is low and when colours are different, contrast is high. That’s why a colour wheel is useful: it places similar colours next to each other and different colours opposite. This might seem obvious but it’s core in managing colour.

Colours are really Complement-Pairs

Every colour has its complement. A colour is a colour because of its opposite on the colour wheel. Complementary colour is both antidote,or the anti-colour if you like, and equally, the perfect painting pairing. You can’t really talk about a colour in the singular. You can’t say red without implying green, yellow without purple, blue without dusting off orange. There can be no colour without it’s complement being out there, somewhere.

 

Every colour has its natural value (degree of light-dark)

You can see this clearly when comparing the natural lightness of yellow and the darkness of purple. This characteristic is important, firstly because when creating images, lights and darks are as important as colour. Seeing a pigment as having value as well as a natural hue helps keep both colour and value in play. Secondly, it follows that you can’t lighten or darken a colour without reducing it’s intensity. By modifying value you are washing out colour.

 

My Palette

I favour a variation of the popular “two versions of each primary” method, sometimes called the “Double Primary Palette”. I use this same approach in all paint media: watercolour, acrylic and oil. The Double Primary Palette places two yellows, two reds and two blues straddling the “real/pure” primary colour. This allows for mixing options in all areas of the colour wheel.

To this I add a selection of tonal workhorse colours that are eminently usable and reasonable in cost.

Colour Shift

Here I have taken an image and reversed the colour