Painting with warm and cool triads. Glazing with transparent pigments.

 

Tom Thomson’s The Jack Pine

The iconic The Jack Pine is arguably the most famous painting by Canada’s most famous artist. Thomson died under mysterious circumstances before the Group of Seven was formed, and this only adds to the mystique. It’s so ubiquitous that it’s perhaps difficult to see it as a painting rather than a piece of Canadian history.

In the following video, I discuss the painting and how it came about.

Painting with Impact and Effect.

Tom Thomson planed his painting using a consistent palette and taking appropriate design approaches that meshed with his feeling for colour. With any painting endeavour, it’s good to have a plan and colour is no exception. Some formality of palette, at least in the early stages, is often a great idea. In this video, I introduce a couple of related approaches:

Painting with Triads

Simply put, this is painting with three colours: nominating a red, a blue and a yellow and so constructing the painting without recourse to other tubes (except white of course, in oil and acrylic). The nice thing about this approach is that it keeps a high degree of consistency in the initial stages, focusing on image-making rather than specific colours – absolute colour as we’ve seen is a bit of a misnomer anyway – colour being relative. This is how I typically paint, although I also use some tonal colours, such as Burnt Sienna and maybe Yellow Ochre. I might well persevere until there is little else to do and only then adjust tones with new pigments, perhaps glazing as an option.

This approach has worked for me in watercolour as well as for oil and acrylic. There are some limits to this approach and I would always start with non-staining pigments, to allow  perhaps pulling pigment out from the paper prior to adding final washes (pulling out brown when washing on blue, for example).

Warm and cool palettes

I naturally tend to gravitate to cool-variant colours and build most of my paintings with them…adding warm at the end as an accent.

For example, circling around the primaries, I tend more often to use cooler variants, particularly with reds and yellows:

Primary Color	Warmer Version	Cooler Version
Red	Cadmium Red	Alizarin Crimson
Yellow	Cadmium Yellow	Lemon Yellow
Blue	Cerulean	Ultramarine

This certainly has served me well with portraits (where skin tones invariably contain a little blue) and I don’t really change my approach with other subjects….except perhaps for some florals, where I might favour a bright Van Gogh-like palette.

Maybe it’s because cool colours are a little more subtle and less in-your-face. Perhaps not as joyful, however they keep your interest and leave something to be dwelt upon. It’s always possible to highlight in warm onto a cool base and I’m not sure that is the case visa-versa. Experiment!!

Exercise

• For your next painting project, choose three colours, one red, one yellow and one blue. Where possible, make these different tubes than from your previous painting. Create and develop the painting without resorting to any other colours. I’m looking forward to seeing the results!

Glazed colour grid

Washing one colour over the other is often an excellent path to vibrant effects, especially in watercolour, whereas over-mixing can create somewhat deadened effects. In the following video, I describe a glazed grid of swaths of colour to show how various pigments behave, one over the other:

Try to achieve mid-value swaths, ideally using a large brush – the fewer brush marks the better! Remember to wait for the first pass to dry before completing the grid. In watercolour a single pass for each application of colour is best…if you move your brush back and forth too much underlying colour will lift! With oil and acrylic adding some medium is key in order that the paint flows and is thin enough that the underlying layer shows through.

Exercise

1. Create a glazed colour grid with your colours as in the glazed colour grid video and description. You don’t have to have the exact same tones. In fact, that’s where the value is: seeing how your colours combine.
2. Quiz questions – which is better for glazing? Yellow Ochre or Hansa Yellow? Likewise, would you choose Alizarin Crimson or Burnt Sienna?

Glazing

Glazing is often sidelined as a painting technique, with perhaps with a little mystique surrounding it. I use it fairly frequently and find it useful for integrating the paint surface, adjusting tone over a complete painting – or just in part.

Transparent, tinted glazes and washes are a great way to modify colour and equally create some interesting transparent effects. With a yellow-tinted glaze, pink and blue will be pulled towards orange and green respectively – as if you’ve put a filter on.  Perhaps the most interesting opportunity is in the way light passes through successive layers of transparent paints, returning deep, vibrant, subtle colour effects to the viewer as the light plays games, reflecting back from successive layers. This works spectacularly with transparent pigments and analogous colours. Unsurprisingly, working across the colour wheel with opaque pigments returns only dead, muddy effects!

In the following video, I glazed just one bloom in a Still Life that I’d painted in oil.

 In acrylic, I would take a very similar approach, using a slow-drying medium, or adding some retarder to my mix. Glazing (wash) in watercolour is of course somewhat different, however the principle is the same!

Exercise

• Review some previous paintings and look for inconsistencies in the way colour is managed or working together. Glaze a specific area to improve the effect – perhaps use the painting you just completed using a triad of colours.