Color - Don't be Afraid of the Dark

Contrast is achieved by adding dark colors next to light colors and using complementary colors next to each other. The biggest problem I witness in a lot of paintings is that there is not enough contrast to pull the eye to the center of interest.

This painting started with the light colors of yellow, red and orange. The complementary colors of green and blue were painted next to the center of interest.

Darker values of those colors are painted near the center of interest to give the subject form and depth.

The background was painted with a medium value of neutral colors so as not to take away anything form the center of interest.

Finally the darkest dark colors are added to make the  light colors pop out of the paper. There is no doubt what  and where the center of interest is located.

Color - Sunset Skies

This painting was taken from a photograph, but the colors were interpreted by many observations of sunlight at sunset.

1. A  simple line sketch to locate the horizon and landscape elements (trees, land, and water) is drawn on the watercolor paper to define the composition.
2. Mixtures of yellow, orange, red, and violet are prepared in the palette.
3. Paint the Sky.  Wet the paper with a clean brush to cover the sky above the horizon.  Paint a gradated wash starting with yellow and adding orange, red, and violet going from a light color to darker color from the horizon to the top of the paper.  Leave a spot of white paper where the brightest sunlight is located. 
4. Paint the Water.  After the sky is dry, Wet the paper with a clean brush to cover the water below the horizon to the bottom of the paper. Repeat the gradated wash of yellow, orange, red, and violet from the horizon to the bottom of the paper. Leave some white paper to indicate the reflection of the sun on the water. 
5. After the water is dry.  Mix a darker value to the same colors used in the sky and water and add the other landscape elements (trees, land, grasses, etc. 

Color - BLUE - Sky, Water, and Mountains

The color Blue is the foundation color for landscapes and seascapes.  My palette contains 5 colors of blue: Cerulean, Cobalt, Ultramarine, Peacock, and Royal.  My color chart is shown below with a dark, medium, and light value mixture of pigment and water.  Blue mixes with all the other colors in the palette to cool down a bright color and mix a variety of beautiful grays.

The landscape above has all the colors of blue used in different areas.

• The sky is a mixture of wet-on-wet Cobalt Blue and Cerulean Blue. Leaving some white paper for the clouds and light red for the sunset color. 
•  The water is a mixture of Cerulean Blue and Peacock Blue.  Leaving some white paper for the waves and red color from the sky.  The colors of the water are reflections of the sky colors. 
• The mountains colors are a dark mixture of Ultramarine Blue and Royal Blue with touches of Hooker's Green, Burnt Sienna, and Red. This makes a variety of dark colors.  Some white paper is left to indicate a reflection off a structure or something.  This gives an interest to the dark colors. 
• The foreground beach and palm tree are painted with Ultramarine Blue, Burnt Sienna and Hooker's Green. 

Blue Color Chart

Color RED - Poinsettia

The red color moves from a hot, permanent red-orange to a magenta with shades of permanent rose and quinacridone violet in between.  What a range of emotions this color includes: excitement, love, and passion to solitude, melancholy and suffering. 

In landscapes reds are used in bright, fiery sunsets as well as twilight and dusk.  Red also represents Christmas and Valentine's Day.

Using a good reference, this flower was painted with a variety of red, orange, and violet colors.  The contrasting color of green is used to make the red brighter and more dynamic. The color RED is very powerful and can take over the mood of a painting.  I use it more for highlights and color variety in a landscape painting.

Color Green and Negative Painting

COLOR -  Painting Green and Negative Shapes

The color green can be more exciting using a variety of hues such as green mixed with yellow, blue and brown.

• With a clean sheet of watercolor paper and a mixture of green, yellow, blue, and brown colors paint a variable background using various mixes of these colors, and don't forget to leave some white paper showing (that will give sparkle to the painting)
• When it is dry, use some of the same colors of the same green and paint negative shapes of leaves, branches, shadows, etc. This process is called negative painting, by painting behind the other shapes to show depth. 
• The illusion of the lighter colors makes it appear to be out in front. The darker colors gives the feeling of being able to see behind the front shapes. 
• The first wash is a light value and using clean colors by not mixing too many colors together.  The green colors are green mixed with yellow, blue, and brown. The gives a variety of color and different value for each green color. 
• Discovering the secret of painting behind is a bit like cutting a hole in a balloon to see what makes it work.  When it is completed, it all looks related and gives you the impression of looking back into the dark spaces behind. 

Painting the COLOR White

Color - Painting White Objects in Sunlight

Starting with a white box.  All colors added must be subtle so as not to take away from the white subject.

• Draw a simple box shape and paint a light blue background to suggest a sunny sky.  Pick the light from the right side so that the colors on that side will be warmer than the rest. 
• Mix a light value of blue for the top of the box.  Use a graded wash from the back to the front, with the front using just water
• Mix a cool red color (red mixed with a small amount of blue) and paint the surface of the ground. 
• The shadow side of the box is 40 % darker than the light side.  Mix a blue gray, at 40% darker value than the front.  The shadow side also receives the reflected light form the floor.   While the shadow color is still wet, lift out the color at the bottom with a dry brush, and add a light value orange color.
• Paint the cast shadow with a darker value of the red color mix. 

The color mixes are shown below:

Color Temperature

         

               Warm Colors                                                                        Cool Colors

It is important to know that there are three "temperatures" of color, warm, cool, and neutral.  The neutral colors cover a very small band and are of little consequence, the warm and cools are a different matter.

My palette is arranged with warm colors on one side and the cool colors on the other.  Black, a neutral color, is obtained by mixing two dark colors - generally a blue and a brown - rather than using Ivory black or Payne's Gray..  This is because, when I paint, I don't think of a particular color, but only of warm and cool. 

My painting plan is to pit warm against cool whenever possible for contrast, and to vary the warms and the cools for variety.   That is, if my cool was a blue with a little green in it in one area, then I'll use the blue with a little violet in it nearby, or even violet.  Similarly, if the warm is yellow in one spot, I'll use a brown, or red or orange near it. The result is a more interesting (contrast) and entertaining (variety) painting. 

Spend a little time experimenting with color combinations and see what you get. There is no magic to any color; they are all cousin's of the original ten and you can identify them with just a little comparison test. If it looks like a green, that's what it is.  Is it a yellow-green, a blue-green, or close to the middle?  Your eyes will tell you all you need to know to match the color with the palette.  

Any color in "nature" is either in your palette or you can mix it form what's there. The warm colors are those we associate  with warmth, the colors of earth and fire:  red, orange, yellow, and brown, and mixtures thereof.  The cool colors are blue and violet and anything with blue in it.  This is easy to understand; we're used to cool blue skies and large bodies of cool blue water. That leaves red-purple and green, which are neutral colors; they are neither warm or cool. The minute we put a little more red in red-purple it becomes warm, or if we mix in blue instead, it becomes cool. A little yellow in green makes it warm, just as blue will make it a cool green. We rarely deal with a dead center red-purple or green; they are usually color biased toward warm or cool 

Mixing Colorful GRAYS

Color mixes from my palette

Early in my painting career I used neutral colors to create gray.  I often used Payne's gray to darken or neutralize the bright colors in my paintings.  My paintings were dull and lacked luminosity. After attending several workshops I discovered that I could create my own more colorful grays by mixing all three primary colors in unequal proportions.  For example, mix a primary yellow with a primary red in equal proportions to obtain an orange.  Then add a small amount of primary blue to gray down the orange.  The resulting gray, however, will be a colorful orangish-gray.

Suddenly my paintings took on a new life, and the only thing I had done was eliminate Payne's Gray from my palette. My paintings were more luminous  and pleasing to the eye because I was mixing "primary grays."

To make colorful grays, there are a few other options you can explore.  You can create grays not only from the primaries, but also from complementary colors.  You can lighten grays by diluting the color with water, or make them saturated for darker areas of a painting by using more of the pigment achieving a "darker black."

There are thousands of combination to come up with a colorful gray.  That is what is so fascinating abut mixing color and getting a different result each time. Some of my color mixes for gray are shown in the photo above.

more on Color to continue ...........

Color Wheel Attributes

The Artist Color Wheel consists of twelve parts:

1. Primary Colors (red, yellow, and blue} placed evenly around the circle.  

2. Secondary Colors (green, orange, and violet) located between the three primary colors 

3. Tertiary Colors are found between each primary and secondary color.  The color between yellow and , orange, for example is yellow-orange. The color found between blue and violet is blue-violet.  

Keeping these three basic kinds of color - the primary, secondary, and tertiary in mind we can define  complimentary, saturated, and compound colors.   

Complimentary are colors found opposite each other on the color wheel.  Red and green are complements, blue and orange are complements, and yellow and violet are complements. 

, 

Saturated colors are all the colors found around the outside of the color wheel. They contain no black, no white, and none of their complementary colors.(or opposite) colors.

Compound colors are colors containing a mixture of the three primary colors.  All the browns, khakis, and earth colors are compound colors.

In order to mix pigments into clean, saturated colors, it is necessary to include a warm and a cool of each of the primary colors in your palette. There is no such thing as a pure primary pigment.  When mixing green, for example, choose a cool blue such as cobalt blue and a cool yellow like lemon yellow to ensure there is no trace of red in the green. Using a warm yellow like yellow-orange or a warm blue such as ultramarine blue would introduce a slight trace of red into the green, resulting in a compound color.

As mentioned above, there are no true primary colors.  Therefore we must know that we are using colors that have a bias toward another color, and we must be able to distinguish which colors they are biased toward. Knowing a color's bias helps prevent artists from ending up with muddy colors when unknowingly mixing two colors that together contain all three primaries. (Red + blue + yellow = brown.)

Watercolors are the hardest paints to keep clean and bright because they often gray when mixed with colors that are incompatible.  The first rule for painting bright watercolors is to use only two or three colors in a mixture. Whenever you add a third color to a mixture, unless it is a tertiary color (those colors closest to the first two colors on the wheel), the mixture will be grayed down or even blackened.

For example, if you mix a red and a yellow, then add a red-orange, your color mixture would remain within three tertiary colors.  The mixture would retain its brightness.  On the other hand, if you added a blue to the same mixture, you would lose the brightness. 

Another rule for keeping your colors vibrant is to make sure that the previous color is completely dry before you glaze with/on another color. 

........to be continued on Color

Learning about Color

We will never be able to learn everything about color, but we can really have a lot fun trying to find the answers.  Every  time we open our palette, we are challenged to study and improve our work.  An open mind, dreaming, reflecting, and studying will bring us a little closer to reaching our goals. However, we cannot ever assume that we have mastered the seemingly endless possibilities of working with color.

Why is it important to to understand color?  When working with watercolor, if you do not completely understand individual color properties, you will never know what a particular watercolor will do on a piece of watercolor paper. That means that you will find it difficult, if not impossible, to comprise and design with color.

Knowledge of the properties of watercolor will help answer the question, "What do I do?"  Is a color grainy?  Is it opaque or transparent?  Is it luminous?  Is it a staining color or one that can be "lifted" easily?  My On-Line watercolor class "Fundamentals in Creating a Watercolor Painting" teaches why colors work together or work against each other. This color theory foundation can be used forever in all future paintings.
Creating your own color wheel from your palette colors is the foundation of understanding what each color will do.

Watercolor History in America

A great article on Watercolor (Must Read)

Watercolor has a fascinating history of American 19th Century Artists such as John Singer Sargent, Thomas Moran, William Trost Richards, John William Hill, and John La Farge as well as modern artists Andrew Wyeth and Milton Avery.

During the second half of the 19th century, watercolor painting developed into a significant force in American art.  By the turn of the century, the popularity of watercolor, as well as its boldness, directness and cheerfulness, led many critics to proclaim watercolor the "American Medium."  Working in a wide range of styles and motifs, amateur and professional artists produced watercolors of technical brilliance and captivating beauty that pushed the boundaries of the medium and positioned watercolor at the leading edge of American art.

The arrival of watercolor as a major genre in American art can be traced to the founding of the American Society of Painters in Water Colors in 1866. Watercolor had long been popular in the United States, but it was largely considered a medium best suited to amateur artists or specialists. such as naturalists and miniature painters.  The Society's first exhibition in 1867 drastically altered this trajectory, and America's leading artists increasingly viewed watercolor as a serious creative and commercial pursuit.

Watercolor continued to attract the attention of the country's most well-known artists through the end of the 19th century. Current museum exhibitions follow the history of watercolor into the 20th century when it became an important medium for artists at he forefront of American modernism and played an important role in the development of abstraction and other modern stylistic developments.

Beyond tracing the historical development of watercolor in the United States modern exhibitions explore the variation in techniques and different approaches taken by forward-thinking American artists.  Today's Watercolor paintings reveal that the American watercolor movement was defined by experimentation as artists continually pursued innovative methods and effects.

Studying watercolor paintings will give a deeper understanding of watercolor's place in the history of American art and an appreciation for the versatility, exuberance and delightfulness of the watercolor medium.

Hampton Roads Weekly

Everett's Classroom Update

My attention has been on developing an on line Watercolor Course. to be released this year.  There was quite a learning curve in using the software and downloading files on the internet. 

The live studio equipment and art demonstrations have been working fine.  There are some new videos to be put on YouTube.  Go to YouTube and type in Everettswatercolors in the search.

Posts on Facebook include a daily drawing of  different subjects. Go to facebook.com/everettswatercolors

These updates will show up on my website (Classes) page.

Comment on this post and we can start up a discussion about anything art related.