Time to focus on colour handling or perhaps investigate colour afresh: basics, a little glazing and mixing greens!
Colour and Colour Mixing
Let’s investigate the mixing of colours in a colour wheel. Using your own colours rather than those any website or book might recommend is where the real value lies. There’s no theory that can replace the experience of how your tubes mix together – it’s a tangible, real-world experience.
Firstly, become comfortable with the basics of the colour wheel. Most art books have something sensible to say about this and a good summary is contained in the first couple of sections on this website: http://www.colormatters.com/color-and-design/basic-color-theory
Secondly, watch the following video, summarizing my approach to colour and mixing:
Exercise
- Now, see if you can develop a colour wheel along similar lines – repeat the video, pausing as you go. My approach is to follow a variation of a palette based on 2 versions of each primary in “warm” and “cool” versions. This aids more predictable colour mixing.
- When you have finished following the video, prove to yourself that you can “decolour” each of the primaries by mixing in a little of the complement: what tonal colour does each give?
- Finally, take one of your tonal colours: burnt or raw sienna, yellow oxide/ochre, burnt or raw umber…it’s not really important which – put out a small squirt and then see if you can replicate the same colour by mixing just the primaries together…as you see, that same target tone will appear…perhaps a little magically!
Glazed colour grid
Glazing one colour over the other is often an excellent path to vibrant effects in acrylics, 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. Add some medium in order that the paint flows and is thin enough that the underlying layer shows through.
Exercise
- Create a glazed colour grid with your colours as in the glazed colour grid video and description. You don’t have to have exactly the same tones. In fact, that’s where the value is: seeing how your colours combine.
- Quiz questions: Which is better for glazing? Yellow Ochre or Hansa Yellow? Likewise, would you choose Alizarin Crimson or Burnt Sienna?
Mixing Landscape Greens
The landscape is full of greens and all yellows and blues will make some sort of green. Greens are on one hand the easiest to create and then perhaps the most difficult to handle. Many greens are too green out of the tube and that’s one reason why I mix all my greens from scratch. I like the variation of results – partially mixed paints are all useful as the colours of nature are never uniform.
- For forest greens, I mix a yellow (normally a neutral yellow like Hansa, Cadmium Light/Lemon) with my trusty Ultramarine. The Ultramarine, being dark and containing red (the complement) creates a brooding, tonal forest green.
- The same yellow with Cerulean or Cobalt makes a much lighter, intense green, and with lots of yellow is pure sunlight on leaves.
- My third mix is made using Phthalo blue. The intense nature of Phthalo gives colour that, to my eye, is impossible to mix using other blues. I use this sparingly to contrast with other types of foliage – perhaps saving it for a special bush or type of plant.
Notice that my approach is all about the blues and I typically go to the same yellow. That’s because the specific yellow seems to have much less effect on the mix. I favour a neutral yellow: primary, Hansa, Cadmium Light/Lemon. I also use Lemon yellow (just wink at it and it turns green) and the opaque, tonal Yellow Ochre, or Oxide for duller chalky passages.
Exercise
- Put out a swath of each of your yellows and then mix across with blues to obtain the natural result of the two. Perhaps try a yellow-green and a blue-green for each, too. Should you be really into greens, then add some white and separately a little brown (the complement). You’re all set to go!