Secrets of A Modern Painter: July 2011
Secrets of A Modern Painter: July 2011

5 Keys to Mixing Color for Oil and Acrylic Painting

Trainyard, Oil, 30 x 40, In Progress
Color is often the painter's most powerful tool of expression, but for many beginners and even seasoned painters it is difficult to control.

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 secondaries 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 Color:

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 ideas on this subject and I vary how I mix, 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, but these are some useful guidelines if you are trying to expand and control your palette and harmonize your color mixes.

Labels: ,

Painting Focal Points - 5 Main Elements of The Center of Attention

Still Life 1, 2011 (In Progress)
Every mark in a painting both calls attention to itself and directs your attention elsewhere.

As a musician seeks to control every aspect of a note to flow in balance and harmony with the rest of the song, the painter should seek to be aware of all dynamic components inherent in their marks - it is then that the subtleties of time can be controlled. Time here has dual meanings: individual marks and sections can be varying speeds as well as the space between distinct and related patterns of colors and shapes throughout the canvas.

When you put too much emphasis on a singular focal point, you will not fully explore the impact of your canvas; try to develop other areas of interest as secondary focal points. However, don't think of this development in terms of details, think of it in terms of counterpoint to your primary area of interest and dominant theme - feel how it can relate and use it to generate energy and imply direction.

5 Elements of Focussing Viewer's Attention

1. Get beyond simply dividing in thirds - learn the proportions of good space division in regards to the Golden Section to understand its power - then see your painting as a series of further divisions within each section.

2. Look at your angles - you want to point toward or away from a section or subject. Direct the viewers attention.

3. Isolate components of color, texture, and value, and realize that the more one element is downplayed, the more the other stands out in contrast. For example. where there is little or no pure color, a spot of color will leap forward. Paint freely while being aware of the connections among variables.

4. Set up your final marks by tempering what surrounds it, build up to the crescendo, the highest notes, and let them fly (they'll probably be the quickest most fleeting marks in regards to time.)

5. Be able to step back and clearly see the sequence of the most important notes from a distance and notice the shape they create through the canvas - that will be a potential path the viewer's eyes will travel.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

Painting Tension

Create tension in your paintings and attempt to hold onto it for as long as possible. Viewers must feel the forces of light and darkness, good and evil, birth and death. Consider the music of Chopin and Beethoven: how their music inspires us to grow in depth and understanding of human nature.

Know where the journey begins: What elements are we starting with? How are they explored and how are they resolved? Listen to how melodies are repeated and altered by different instruments, and how tension arises as the harmonies get progressively more complex, how maybe the speed picks up, and the lines of notes communicate in a way that almost seem to be like a battle, like the struggle for humanity to find traction on the earth, to find resolution and peace.

Consider the focal points of your canvas as the heights of tension or resolution, both physical and existential, and don’t be satisfied with just fancy brushwork or increased contrasts - pull the viewer in and make them feel as if the main character is standing on the edge of a precipice, reaching out, praying for the strength to survive.

We must be made to feel the struggle of life; let us feel your struggle to create, to open yourself to how powerful artistic freedom is and the impulse to succeed in capturing it in a single frame, in a frozen and suspended moment in time.

Labels: , , ,
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...