color mixing Archives | Carol L. Douglas

July 22, 2019

Monday Morning Art School: mixing greens

The rookie error for summer is to paint all foliage using the same basic color. You lose more points if it’s sap green.

Hazy mountain afternoon: Keuka Lake, by Carol L. Douglas. Available.

I have a student who reacts to my pulling out black paint by making the sounds of a rattlesnake at me. She’s been fully inculcated into the idea that black should be banned.

Michael Wilcox published a famous watercolor pigment guide called Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green. Most of what it tells you can now be found on the internet, but it’s where I first got the idea to add back the banned black.

His point was that there are many routes to the same destination, and that to really mix colors, you need to understand what pigments you’re using, not work from trade names for colors. Consider sap green, for example—a staple of many plein air painters’ toolkit. It’s really a convenience mix made of a phthalo blue and some kind of yellow. The same is true of Hooker’s Green.

Chart courtesy of Victoria Brzustowicz

The single-pigment (‘true’) greens available are chromium oxide green, viridian, and cobalt green. Chromium oxide green is a lovely, heavy, natural green. Unfortunately, it outweighs everything it’s mixed with. Viridian and cobalt green are lovely, but expensive. Beware viridian hue—it’s just another phthalo in disguise.

By now, foliage has settled into a deeper, more uniform tone. The rookie error of August is to paint all your greens using the same basic color, modulating lighter or darker for highlights and shadows. You’ll have much more life in your trees if you know all the different ways you can get to leafy green. One of the most useful greens is black plus cadmium yellow lemon (or Hansa yellow).

Mixed greens, in oils.

The best way to navigate the colors of foliage is to avoid greens out of a tube altogether. A system of paired primaries gives you more options, avoiding the acidity of phthalo, the weight of chromium oxide green, or the soul-sucking darkness of sap green.

In my experience, bad paint mixing causes paintings to go wrong faster than anything else. Constantly over-daubing to modulate the paint color distorts the original drawing and makes a grey mush. If you’re confident of the color, you can apply it fast and accurately.

I make my greens on a matrix, which I’ve shown you both mixed (at top) and on a chart (below). I’m leaving for Castine Plein Air, but if I were teaching, I’d be drilling my students on green this week.

Swatches by Jennifer Johnson

First mix greens according to the chart, and then modulate your resulting greens with tints (meaning a mix of white and a color). The specific tints are unimportant, but the most useful one for landscape is a mix of white, ultramarine and quinacridone violet, making a pale lavender. It is great for atmospheric perspective.

Note that blue/black pigments are much stronger than the yellows. You need about half the amount of blue or black as you do yellow.

Your assignment is to hit paint swatches as closely as you can.

The second exercise involves stopping at your local hardware store for a few paint swatches. These are Benjamin Moore brand, but you should be able to find similar ones elsewhere. There are two off-whites: one cool and one warm. There’s yellow, green, and two soft blues. Your assignment is to mix until you think you’ve hit the exact color. Then put a dot of it on the card to see how close you got. (If you’re working in watercolor, the dot goes on paper instead.)

Jennifer’s neutral swatches, up close.

I also have my students make neutrals using combinations of ultramarine blue with burnt sienna and raw sienna. I use ultramarine blue and burnt sienna as my standard dark-neutral, because it can go to the warm or cool side depending on how it is mixed. Raw sienna plus ultramarine is my go-to starting point for granite and the sands of our northern beaches.

May 6, 2019

Monday Morning Art School: Add back the banned black

A color exercise that can be done with anything from a dime-store watercolor kit to a professional palette.

The Servant, by Carol L. Douglas

Back before black was banned from the palette, we had shades and tints. Shades are made by adding black to a pure color. Tints are an admixture of white to a pure color. Shades aren’t an effective way to make something darker, but they often make nice new hues.

What we consider acceptable in color-mixing is style-driven, just like everything else. For example, see the Permanent Pigments Practical Color Mixing Guide of 1954, below. It’s all about making shades and tints. That’s a hint about why mid-century paintings looked so grey. A little shading goes a long way.

A mid-century guide to mixing colors.

Today’s exercise is to make a paint chart playing the warm tones on your palette against the cool tones. Both of these examples were done in class by students. My definition of warm vs. cool has shifted over time. Ten years ago, I included quinacridone violet among the cools; last month I had my student stick it in among the warms. That’s because warm-vs.-cool is an arbitrary designation.

The chart in watercolors.

The instructions are a little different for solid-media students than for watercolorists. In either case, start by marking off your paper or canvas with 1” squares, allowing enough room for the cool colors on the left and the warm colors across the top.

Watercolorists (and users of fluid acrylics) just need to mix the colors. Oil painters need to tint their colors with a little bit of white. I’ll get to that below.

In watercolor, the column on the far left should be pure pigments straight from the tube: blues, greens, black, and violets if you want to call them cool. The row across the very top should also be pure pigments, but in the warm tones: reds, oranges and yellows.

The boxes in the middle of the chart are all mixtures. For example, the second-row-second-column box on Sheryl’s chart is black+raw umber. The third-row-second-column box is ultramarine blue+raw umber. The bottom right box is sap green+quinacridone violet, and so on.

The greatest difficulty for watercolor painters is to try and keep the color balance equal. Pigments differ in density, and it’s hard to control dilution. Still, try to use the same amount of each in your mixtures.

Sheryl was doing something my friend Poppy Balser calls “licking the paper.” (That’s partly because she was using a very cheap paper.) That means she was fussing after she put the first brushstroke down. That gave her final chart a mottled appearance. Try to get the mixture down in one brushstroke and leave it.

The chart in oils.

Solid media (oil, gouache, and acrylic) painters have a slightly different assignment. They need to add white to their mixtures. I always add it on the cool side of the chart, by mixing a large clump of the cool-plus-white colors and using that to work across, modulating the warm colors. Working this way, your second-row-second-column box will be (black+white)+raw umber. The third-row-second-column box will be (ultramarine blue+white)+raw umber, and so on.

Note that there is one three-way mixture on the left column. I do not typically paint with a tubed violet, so row five started with a mixed violet to which I added white. If you use a dioxazine purple, it belongs here.

Your last task for this week is to use color temperature, rather than value (lightness or darkness) to define the volume of a sphere, as in Sheryl’s example, below. Her shadows are warm, and her light is cool. Experiment with reversing that as well.

The shape of this sphere isn’t defined with value (lightness or darkness) but with a shift in color temperature. Try it!

This blog post was originally published on November 13, 2017. I’m traveling today.

March 5, 2019

Buying too many paints is a classic rookie error

Mix, don’t buy, your colors.

Grand Bahama palms, by Carol L. Douglas. There’s really no reason to buy any greens for oil painting, and just one will do for watercolors.

“[Our] watercolor instructor wants us to buy every color we need for a painting. I think it is unnecessary because you can mix colors to get the same or similar results. What is your opinion?” a reader asked.

I ask my students to buy a specific palette based on paired primaries, but that is very different from asking them to buy a specific pigment for a painting. An artist who regularly switches out his or her paints is akin to a pianist who rearranges the keys for each song.

Buying too many paints is a classic rookie error. It’s easy to get pulled into a revel of paint-buying when you’re feeling unsure. We’ve all done it.

Tomatoes, by Carol L. Douglas, was painted without any red or green on my palette. The red you see is violet and orange.

The clear leader in marketing romance, as Handprintcalls it, is Daniel Smith. I sometimes go to their website to feel the verbiage wash over me. “The mineral for our Red Jasper Genuine comes from India’s Gwalior region and is colored a rich red from iron. Historically it was often carved as amulets, vases and other decorative items. India’s red jasper was one of stones used to beautifully embellish the Taj Mahal with other semi-precious stones that were carved and inlaid into the white marble in curvilinear flower forms… Spiritually, red jasper is associated with the base or root chakra and helps to ground and energize/heal the body and provide balance and protection.”

I can infer it’s an iron oxide red. Not as romantic, but cheap and commonly available.

Headlights, by Carol L. Douglas. No black here, either. It’s ultramarine blue and burnt sienna.

Daniel Smith loves to tell people how to use each pigment: “Red Jasper Genuine is a wonderful color for landscapes, birds like the male common chaffinch and reddish egret, as well as animals who have a medium to light reddish coat like the red panda.” I imagine a studio with hundreds of tubes of their paint, in careful rows, tagged, “for sunlit shadows,” or “for moonlight,” or “for powerful, monolithic shapes.” It’s all very entertaining and poetic, but will do nothing for your painting.

Get tough, Reader. Ask your teacher the purpose in all these single-use paints. If the answer isn’t satisfactory, it’s time to find a new instructor. Mixing color is so integral to painting that a class that avoids it isn’t going to teach you anything useful.

Ogunquit rocks, by Carol L. Douglas. All four paintings were done with the same palette.

On the heels of that note came another. “Do you teach color mixing by visual understanding or by paint name?” a reader asked. “The moment I understood that there was no such thing as red, blue, and yellow, the world changed and it became possible to see the nature of each color.”

I teach color mixing (as distinct from color theory) on the basis of pigment. I’ve developed, over the years, a stable palette that gives me the widest gamut (range) of color tones. They don’t include convenience mixes.

These are combinations of two or more pigments to approximate a different pigment. Many of them were developed as substitutes for antiquated pigments that may have been pulled from the market because they’re fugitive or toxic. They are limited, because:

Every time you add another color to a mix, you’re adding overtones;
You can easily make the mix yourself if you should need it and;
They’re inconsistent. Their marketing name tells you nothing.

How do I know what pigment(s) are in my paint? They’re written on the tubes, in tiny letters. Here’s a quick primer on how to read a paint tube. It sounds complicated, but it’s nothing compared to the frustration of painting with the wrong materials.

June 11, 2018

Monday Morning Art School: what is color?

Understanding color space is the most important thing an artist can do.

A little bit of everything, by Carol L. Douglas. That’s the incredibly cool light of a midsummer day.

Color is a word with radically different definitions depending on its use. In optics, it refers to

the unique way in which the cone cells in the human eye are stimulated by electromagnetic radiation. How an object reflects or emits light gives it its unique color.

In common parlance, we think of red, green or blue as colors. In art, however, those aren’t colors. Colors have three attributes, all of which you must understand in order to navigate color space successfully:

Value – How light or dark is the pigment?

Hue – Where does the color sit on the color wheel? All colors fall into one of the following hue families: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. Within those families, however, are many subdivisions.

Chroma – How much intensity, or “punch” does the color have?

Doe drinking in the woods, by Carol L. Douglas, has warm light and cool shadows.

Since color has three attributes, it exists in a three-dimensional color space. However, we’re used to looking at it in two dimensions, in the form of a color wheel. I think the Quiller watercolor wheel is the best color wheel, since it shows you where neutral pigments fall inside the hue families.

Still, the conventional color wheel doesn’t take value into consideration. Every pigment has its own natural darkness or lightness. Dioxazine purple, for example, is very dark coming out of the tube. Lemon yellow is very light coming out of the tube. That does not mean that dark colors are cool and light colors are warm, however. Consider burnt umber. It’s very dark, and it’s also very warm.

Winch (American Eagle),by Carol L. Douglas. There was definitely some warm light that winter day.

There’s a misunderstanding that mixing across the color wheel darkens pigments. Only with certain greens and reds does this work. Mixing across the color wheel gives you neutrals: grays and browns.

We call the hue families of green, blue and violet “cool” and the hue families of yellow, orange and red “warm.” Within each hue family, there are warm and cool variations. Gamblin has this nifty chart of warm and cool pigments so you can see where your paints fall.

White, black, and grey are chromatic neutrals. Raw umber is fairly neutral. Naphthol red and phthalo blue are very high-chroma colors. In general, modern pigments are much more intense than the mineral pigments of the Renaissance.

Cobequid Bay Farm, by Carol L. Douglas. Warm evening light translates to cool evening shadows.

It works to sort colors this way. I use a system of paired primaries which gives me a great, high-key mixing range. However, the whole idea of warm-vs.-cool is a painterly convention. It’s best to not have this discussion with a physicist, who will tell you that you have it backwards. He may be right, but that doesn’t mean he can paint.

I’ve written about the color temperature of light here, but there’s a simple rule that helps. The predominant shadows will always be the opposite (across the color wheel) from the color of the light. On a sunny day, the light will be cool and the shadows will be warm. At dusk the light will be golden and the shadows violet. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, but it’s a good place to start.

Breaking storm, by Carol L. Douglas, courtesy Camden Falls Gallery. I’m potting around on this boat this week, teaching watercolor. Wish you were here!

I strongly recommend this video from Gamblin, which organizes color space in three dimensions. It’s also full of information about the history of color.

There’s no internet (and darn little cell phone service) out in Penobscot Bay. After this post, my blog is going dark for the week. Don’t be alarmed! Assuming there are no pirates, I’ll be back next Monday.

November 13, 2017