My focus on color is not to give comprehensive theories or complex explanations, but to give a few key principles and lessons I’ve found work well for plein air painting.
Key Principles
Relationships
Relationships are important and must be understood. A single color is beautiful only because of its relationship to other colors.
Curiosity
When it comes to anything we do in art, approach it with deep curiosity. This is especially true when it comes to color. Think and act like a child getting a new box of 64 crayons. Test each one out fearlessly. I’m a big fan of making your own Richard Schmid color charts. Invest your resources wisely; for any serious artist, knowing what your colors do when mixed together is the best knowledge you can acquire.
Here are a few of my color charts:
Above is my Viridian color chart.
The viridian, first column on the left, is mixed down with various shades of white. Then each column to the right is viridian mixed with every other color on my palette, then mixed down with equal parts of white. Since viridian is a strong color, the mix is not 50/50 by volume, but rather visually, by appearance. What I learned is how beautifully harmonious all these colors are with every other color. That’s because this one color, viridian, was used to create the harmony.
Value
Keep in mind from last week’s post, Value is more important than color for building a strong compelling composition. Color is secondary to value. Get the value right and pretty much any color will work. Get the value wrong and color will do little to make your painting connect.
Volume
Different styles of painting require different amounts of paint. Giving yourself a good amount of fresh usable paint on your palette is of the basic utmost importance and the easiest thing to do to improve your painting. All paints and all brands have different drying times. For watercolorists, there’s no excuse; you can always rewet a dried block of paint. So, squeeze out fresh paint every time. For oil painters, if your palette paint skins over or becomes matte, it’s time to scrap it off and put fresh paint down. In all cases, don’t skimp on the quantity of paint on your palette for the size painting you are painting. It’s always better to scrap off the excess paint and make a mud pile than to skimp and short the painting of required paint. As I walk around seeing student palettes, my first words typically are, “use more paint”.
Complementary
Knowing your complementary colors is something good to memorize. An easy way to remember these positions is to think of a clock. 12 positions occupying a 360 degree circle.
Since there are three primary colors – Red, Yellow and Blue – displayed on a color wheel (clock), each primary color is in a position of one third (occupying the 12, 4, 8 positions on our clock). The secondary colors are Green, Violet and Orange (occupying the 2, 6, 10 positions).
These secondary colors are occupying positions in-between the primary colors; positioning the primaries directly opposite the secondary colors.
Complementary Colors
Primary Secondary
Yellow ->-> Violet
Blue ->-> Orange
Red ->-> Green
Grays
When you mix complementary colors together, you’ll get beautiful grays. Get to know these grays well. Do a few color charts and samples on a spare panel. Your ability to make and use gray effectively will give you the ability to enhance your brighter and purer colors, because bright, pure colors appear brighter and purer when placed next to or in the vicinity of a grayed down version of that color. So, don’t use black to gray down your color; try mixing in its complementary color first. Likewise, when you want to brighten or lighten a color, you can mix in a lighter valued hue such as yellow or a radiant blue. Ask yourself, is that lighter value warmer or cooler. If it’s warmer, lighten it with yellow; if it is cooler, lighten it with white or even a radiant blue.
Harmony
Harmony of colors is when there is an overall good feeling about all the colors used. The colors are all playing well together. There’s a good distribution of the colors throughout the painting.
Disharmony is when there’s a standout color. It feels like it’s screaming or screeching at you. If this is the case, you may need to add this color in some other location or mix it into some of the other colors.
Color wheels
Good color wheels to study are the various Quiller Color Wheels on the web.
Stephen Quiller places actual paint colors on his wheel.
Comprehensive Quiller Color Wheel
Simplified Quiller Color Wheel
Transparent vs. Opaque
Transparency offers the color to truly glow. The physics: light passes through the transparent color and bounces off the white of the canvas and illuminates the color on the way to your eyeballs. Opaque colors block out most, if not all, of light’s ability to illuminate the paint.
Opaque colors reflect the light off the surface of the paint.
One of many oil painting techniques is painting a transparent underpainting as your blocking stage of design. This is the preferred method I’m currently using for most plein air and studio work.
Glazing and Scumbling
Glazing is using thinned down transparent paint to influence selected areas of a dried painting to cool off, warm up, or gray down areas. Glazes are applied like thin watercolor washes.
Scumbling is using the same thinner or even semi-opaque paint to lighten or bring out some texture in selected areas of the painting. John Carlson says, “A scumble is used for reducing the value contrast and color contrasts in a picture, when these have become too widely differentiated. The Scumble will lighten the darks and darken the lights a trifle (if the lights are very light). The Scumble is applied just like the glaze.”
Examples of good color use
Joaquín Sorolla – Mending the sails 118” x 87” 1896
In Sorolla’s masterpiece, there are so many good compositional design choices. I want you to focus in on two colors he uses, the cadmium red of the gentleman’s belt and the cool blues within the shadows of white shapes. Just pay attention to where and how he’s placed these two primary colors. The bits of red from the belt are also found in the greenery. The blues, coming from the sky’s influence on white shapes, are found all over the forms of the folds of the sail, but are framed so well by the framing poles on the right. The blues in the shadows of the sail get a touch richer and deeper in purity the closer our eyes get to the focal point. Also, look at how his use of dynamic tension of shapes is right at the point of the man’s hat, as it almost touches the other man’s sleeve.
Marc Anderson – Early Bird Special 18×24
This award-winning painting shows a beautiful use of warm color harmony throughout. However, most of this painting is cool darks. Marc just used a good amount of warmth within his darks to create and maintain the harmony. Also look at his use of complementary violet grays in and around his warm yellow sky. Marc understands the power grays have in a painting to truly make his pure colors really shine.