A week to review colour handling or perhaps investigate colour afresh: basics, impressionism, 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

1. 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.
2. 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?
3. 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!

Impressionist Colour

The Impressionists changed the world of colour and in this section, I review their lasting legacy. Colour theory described how colours work together and this, along with the advent of tube paints enabled painters to paint where they previously couldn’t and the invention of the camera loosened the bonds of reality – all of these really changed the game.

In the following video, I expand on how the Impressionists changed the face of painting, using colour in fundamentally new ways:

Relative colour exercise

Here’s the relative colour exercise from the video: look unflinchingly at the dot in the center of the red circle for about a minute; then look at the dot in the center of the white circle.

 

Lessons from the Impressionists

The Impressionists were the first group of painters to use colour differently. They went from primarily using colour for description to experimenting with expressive colour. They knew the colour theory and practice from lesson 2 and used it for impressionistic rather than descriptive purposes. This consisted of 3 main elements:

The colour of Shadow

Higher use of full-chroma (high colour content) throughout, particularly in the shadows. Previously, painters had dulled down shadow areas by taking out colour with the complement, darkening toward black in the same colour range. The Impressionists, seeking to maintain vibrancy, moved to cooler versions of the in-light colour, essentially swinging around the colour wheel rather than going through the center towards black. So bright oranges become crimsons, purples and blues. Yellows move from green to blue and indigo. I don’t imply that they did this consistently: they were in reality a fairly disparate variety of painters, turned into a movement by history. However the shift in use of colour exists and continues with us today.

Placement of complements

Whereas mixing complements neutralize each other, placing them next to each other has the opposite effect: it creates excitement and vibrancy, each emphasizing the other. Complements, directly opposite each other on the colour wheel, are in effect the opposite and if you like, create a stronger colour gradient or cliff. The fundamental characteristic is that all colour is relative and placing dissimilar colours one by the other makes for high relative contrast: red next to green, blue with orange, yellow with purple. Seems familiar – just ask the advertising industry, they know full well how to grab your attention!

Broken colour

The Impressionists also used dabs of pure primary colour, placed next to each other, to blend in the eye, often with short, broken brush strokes. This “optical blending” was taken to the limit with Pointillism: Seurat and Signet being perhaps the best known. This group used tiny dots of pure colour, essentially pixilating the image for it to be reconstructed in the eye of the viewer. All impressionists did some of this, placing yellow and blue to form green, red and yellow in lieu of orange, reds and blues for purple. Using this as part of a picture can be very effective, although I have never been totally convinced about the pure Pointillist theory, as these images leave me a bit cold. As a footnote, I’d also mention that I’ve not encountered much Pointillism in the world of watercolour.

Exercise

• Paint from a reference of your choice. Use cues from impressionism in use of colour in the shadows: cooler but still noticeable. Add in colour to the cast shadow areas as well. Brushstrokes of  broken colour and placement of complements to complete the impressionist effect!

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 exactly the 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?

Mixing Greens

The summer 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. Whether using oil, acrylic or watercolour, I use the following mixes:

1. 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.
2. The same yellow with Cerulean or Cobalt makes a much lighter, intense green and with lots of yellow is pure sunlight on leaves.
3. 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.

With watercolour in particular, I wait until the last minute to add this last colour. I know that it is very staining so I need to be sure as to where it is going!

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 (oils and acrylic) and separately a little brown (the complement). You’re all set to go!