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| Trainyard, Oil, 30 x 40, In Progress |
The secret of color is not the number of possibilities, it's how you limit them to establish order within a given range.
Take stock of your colors: How many colors do you own? How many end up on your palette for each session? Do you mix your secondary colors and variations, or buy various tubes? Are you sure which colors are warm and which are cool? Can you instantly mix the color you want?
You know color is relative – so I am not advocating being able to mix every color - it is about controlling the range you have established - you want to limit the variables so as to be able to control the scale you’re working with.
The best thing I ever did, after a few years of experimenting with every color I could find was to simplify my colors to the 3 primaries: Red, Yellow, and Blue, plus white and black. I chose warm variations: Cadmium Red Med Hue, Cadmium Yellow Light Hue (or pale or medium depending on the brand) and ultramarine blue plus titanium white and ivory black. Any mixture was potentially warm and with the addition of white and black I would cool them. You will find many arguements and variations about yellow, but I choose to take Cad Yellow Light as being warm and I interpret Yellow Medium and Deep as more of a light orange, of course also warm, but easily mixed from Yellow Light with the addition of a little red.
Almost every color on my canvases has at least a pin drop of black in it to temper the chroma, in a sense, black is often my mother color, my harmonizing color - I know that seems strange and in direct contradiction to most teachings, but color straight from the tube is too intense for my tastes. I think even the tiniest amount of black can give a color a sense of the sublime. I have often referred to challenging beauty, to pushing against it again and again until when it emerges - in spite of the tension and conflict - it is so much more beautiful; that is where adding black to colors takes on its symbolic nature. I want always to hold beauty at bay because that is not my ultimate goal; beauty may arise though - out of the expression and communication.
5 Keys to Mixing Acrylic or Oil Colors:
1. Simplify your palette and learn to create many variations with limited colors.
2. Practice mixing color variation scales between two colors for a range of secondaries. Aim for 8 to 10 variations between red and yellow, red and blue, and yellow and blue. Try to begin to think in terms of dual color mixtures vs. specific hues to increase vibrancy and interest and continue working on feeling color. So instead of thinking blue here, orange there, think blue-violet and red-orange, or whatever you like. Try to keep the mixtures fresh so within each brush stroke you can see hints of the variations. Here is a 3 minute video demonstration of this color mixing exercise.
3. Choose to have a sense of warm or cool light hitting your subjects, and the opposite temperature in your shadows.
4. When it's time to expand your palette, get 3 more primaries, this time cool variations: examples are Lemon Yellow, Alizarin Crimson, and Phthalo Blue - continue the dual color mixture exercises and learn to mix those together plus with white and black to create a full spectrum.
5. Now with a cool and warm spectrum both made with different pigments keep one or the other sets of pigments in the light and the other in the shadow.
Of course, there are many theories on mixing colors and I vary how I approach it regularly to experiment, sometimes bringing both warm and cool together to use a more pure and full spectrum in a complete value scale, something I will cover more in a later post. These are some useful guidelines if you are trying to expand and control your palette and harmonize your color mixes.
Of course, there are many theories on mixing colors and I vary how I approach it regularly to experiment, sometimes bringing both warm and cool together to use a more pure and full spectrum in a complete value scale, something I will cover more in a later post. These are some useful guidelines if you are trying to expand and control your palette and harmonize your color mixes.
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