Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to my studio. My name is Rachel Broadwell, and this is my Siris on oil painting for beginners. In this course, we're going to begin exploring the world of color. But this was not going to be just your typical color theory class. We're going to put theory into practice with actual paint, and throughout this course we will be using a limited palette. So no more than 3 to 4 colors plus white, and I'll demonstrate a few different limited palettes for you. But I just want you to know that there's no need for you to have an assortment of limited palettes. You just need to have one limited palettes because you are going to be able to unleash it and create a world of color that you never thought possible. Throughout this course, I'm going to be guiding you through a number of projects that focus on just one concept at a time, and these concepts build upon one another. And so I really encourage you. Teoh, take your time with this course and you may want to just focus on one concept at a time. I know that the world of color is very immense. It says. Why does it is the and so you really do need to take the time to really master these concepts. I know that when you walk into an art supply store, it can feel really overwhelming to see how many colors and tubes of paint that there are. It's easy to think that you need to buy specific tubes of paint in order to achieve certain things as a painter. However, after this course, I hope that your biggest take away is to know that you do not need tohave an infinite number of paint tubes. You truly only need three or four plus whites, and that's a beginner. You really should commit yourself. Teoh Learning those colors learning the properties of your specific limited palate because you're going to be able Teoh, unlock its potential and achieve amazing things, and you're not going to need very many colors at all. And when you do choose to add more colors to your palate, you're going to be able to already have a grasp on how you can handle it with your established palette. And not only does using a limited palate help you to unleash the power of that limited palate. But it also makes the process of learning to paint much easier, because when you have a lot of colors on your palate, you're constantly having to make decisions as to what color is going to be needed to create the effect that you want. I'm sure that you've seen artists paint where they have their entire pallet filled with different piles of colors, and they have a warm and cool version of every primary color, plus some secondary colors as well. And that's great. There's nothing wrong with that, but it can be very overwhelming. And in this course I'm going to show you that you can actually create very similar colors. Two tubes of paint that you might buy individually and pre made and in this course will not only focus solely on using your limited palate. But I'm also going to show you some techniques for mixing colors and working within a specific color scheme of your choosing. We're going to spend a lot of time working on reduced chroma colors, also known as grays or neutrals, and I'm going to show you that by using harmonious mixes of neutral colors that you will create a really subtle and beautiful vibrant painting and not a painting that feels muddy. And of course I really hope that you will share your projects with us in the project section. There are some resource is for you to use in that project section, if you would like. And, as always, please ask me any questions. If there's anything that you need further clarified or even ideas that you have that should be included in a course like this that aren't already, I am very receptive to your guys to be back, and I am happy to add additional videos to this course and again. This is not really a color theory course. We will touch base on just some very fundamental concepts of color theory. So if you're feeling a little shaky on color theory, I would encourage you to check out some of the great courses here in skill share that go really deep into color theory. But you definitely do not need to be a color theory master to take this course because we're really going to focus on pigments and mixing and achieving different effects with a very limited palettes. So I hope that you're really excited about this course again. I can't wait to see your projects and have discussions with you, so please share whatever you would like and let's get into painting.
2. How to Approach this Course: As I said, there's quite a few projects in this course, and I had originally thought about breaking this course into individual courses. But I really want to show you that by proceeding through color and an order that builds from the simple to the more complex that you could really do a lot with very little. And I'm worried that if I created individual courses that that order might get lost, my advice for proceeding through this course because there are so many projects that build upon one another is that perhaps just get a bird's eye view a general view of all the concepts in this course, but then go through just one project at a time and really take your time with these projects. I designed some of them to be very simple and loose and fun, and others are going to be a little bit more challenging. So I encourage you to take your time. And if at any time you start feeling frustrated, then that's an indication that it's just time to take a break because painting really needs to be enjoyable. Otherwise we won't do it
3. A Handful of Supplies: For this course, you will literally need just a few handfuls of supplies. Throughout this course, I will be using a couple of different limited palettes. But this is going to be at my primary workhorse here so you can see that I have three primary colors a blue, a red, a yellow, and then I also have a neutral color. I chose raw number. And of course, you also need white. So none of the exercises or projects in this course will require any more than four colors plus whites. And typically we will only be using the three primaries plus whites, and you can use any brand, and you can use colors of your choice. All right, so next we are going to, of course, need a few utensils. I would recommend a couple of small brushes for the projects in this course and appellate knife to do You're mixing. I'm going to be using some medium. I will be using an al could medium. This is a walnut Al Kidd made by M. Graham, and the great thing about Al kids is that they dry really fast. So if you paint thinly enough with this medium, you may have a dry painting within about 24 to 36 hours, which will be very useful for many of the projects in this course. The solve it that I like to use for oil painting is this Citrus essence brush cleaner, and this is what I used to clean my brushes. It's much better for you than even the odorless mineral spirits, which are very irritating for me. And I do talk a little bit about this in my intro to materials course for oil painting for beginners. So check that out. If you haven't already. I've created this template for the color wheel that will be creating in this course. You can download this from the resource is section and print it off, and then you'll also want to have some way to transfer that template on to your substrates . I recommend transfer paper, also called carbon paper or graphite paper, and then finally, you'll need some kind of substrate to paint on. I'll be doing all of my demonstrations on this paper. This is Arches oil primed paper. It's really nice for doing studies, and you can paint on both the front and the back of this paper, so it's a really great way to experiment. It doesn't have a lot of texture, and that's really great for making swatches and color wheels.
4. Color Theory Basics: This course is meant to be a very practical guide to color as it pertains to actual paint and traditional media that uses pigments. However, we do need to touch base on just some of the basics of color theory, and so that's what we'll cover in this short video. Basically, color theory explores the science and art of color. It seeks to explain how humans perceive color the practice of using pigment to replicate the color of light, how color mixes, matches or contrasts with other colors. Color theory also involves the psychological messages. Colors communicates. One of the biggest challenges for artists, especially artists who use traditional media such as oil paints or watercolor or acrylic, is that we are trying to translate the color of light, and we are limited because the tools and materials that we have are the colors of pigments . So we are trying to translate additive color using Onley subtracted color, and that is what we will spend. The majority of this course exploring color has three distinctive and inherent properties, and those air Hugh Kromah and value temperature is something often thrown in the mix when talking about properties of color. However, temperature is not an inherent property of color, meaning it's very subjective and completely relies on relations and perceptions. So if you want to learn more about color temperature, I have two previous courses in this Siri's that go in depth on color temperature. Because while it's very important to understand, as it's part of the painting, vernacular color theory seeks to understand color through logic. And since color temperature is very subjective and subject to your own interpretation, I've decided to create individual courses that go into depth on color temperature. Now let's go over some basic vocabulary as it pertains to color theory. Hugh is a word that is often used interchangeably with the word color, and we may use it interchangeably within this course. So whether I say Hugh or color, I'm referring to the same property. And when we are talking about paint, we're talking about the colors as they come it straight from the tube before you've mixed them with anything else, whether it's white, black or any other color. There are, of course, some boutique colors out there that already have White added, and so I would just advise you to be aware of those, and to probably not use them as a primary color because you really want your colors to be at their full intensity so that you can make sense out of mixing them. As we explore the concept of hue, we will be talking, Ah, lot about primary colors. We, of course, know that primary colors are typically referred to simply as red, yellow and blue will then be talking a little bit about secondary colors, which, of course, are your oranges, greens and violets, and the tertiary colors include every color in between. In this course, we are going to spend the majority of the time exploring Koroma. Chroma refers to the range from pure color as in straight out of the tube to a neutral gray . We typically achieve neutralized colors or reduced chroma colors by mixing complementary colors to create neutrals, so the colors that appear directly across from one another on the color wheel are generally referred to as complementary colors. We can also achieve neutralized colors by mixing all of the primaries and secondaries. So if we mix red, yellow and blue that is also a muted color or neutralized color, it's important to understand that reduced chroma colors or neutral colors or muted colors. These air, all interchangeable words, encompass a full range of values and Hughes. It's not just middle gray that can be referred Teoh as a reduced chroma, color or gray. In fact, most of the colors that you'll use to complete paintings are going to be reduced chroma colors. Sometimes even the brightest color in your painting is still going to be a reduced chroma. It's important to know that chroma as a word is often used interchangeably with the word saturation. With the rising popularity of photography, the word saturation has become part of our everyday vocabulary. But it's important to understand the difference. Saturation refers to the purity of color in lightwaves, while chroma refers to the purity of color in pigments. And since we're using pigment, we will use the word chroma. And now let's move on to the final and third property of color, which is value. Value refers to the range of dark to light achieved with any hue. Each pure color or hue has a unique local value. For example, yellow has a lighter local value than violet, red and greens, and to have a middle local value, and this will be very useful information. As we explore value further through color, you can shift to colors value by mixing it with another color of a lighter or darker local value, rather than using white or black in some cases. And this is a very powerful thing to understand in painting. When we darken a color, we refer to that as shading. So adding black to a color too dark in the value or adding a color with a darker local value are ways that you can shade your color to decrease the value. Tinting refers to lightning the value of a color by adding white or a color with a lighter local value. If you've taken my course on poster studies, you will probably remember that Loki refers to the darker half of the value scale, and high key refers to the lighter half of the value scale. And now let's talk about how black and white fit into the greater scheme of color theory and color application. You may have heard some debate as to whether black and white are colors in terms of additive color. They are not white is the cumulative effect of all colors being combined, while black is the absence of light altogether. But in the world of pigments and subtract of color, black and white are colors because they're made from pigments just like every other color of paint. Blacks tend to be a very dark violet blue, while whites tend to be a very light yellow but can also be very light versions of other colors. Some artists mix their own black, which I will show you how to do in this course, and others choose to use a ready made black from a tube. So what is the big deal about additive color versus attractive color? Well, as artists, we have the unique challenge of trying to translate through subjective color, the effects of additive color, additive color. Being the color of light encompasses every perceivable color to the human eye and, quite honestly, even beyond that, we can see amazing effects in the natural world created by additive color, and we might really struggle. Teoh communicate those phenomenon through pigments. And quite honestly, even photography cannot capture the full range of additive color with subtracted color, which is what we are limited. Teoh with pigments. Colors reduce down Teoh, a dark or a black as opposed to additive color, which, when combined, adds up to a white light the pigments that we have at our disposal, while vastly greater than the pigments that artists of previous generations had access Teoh have very little in common with the additive colors that we see in nature. For example, think about the crystal clear Jewell like waters of a tropical ocean. We cannot go into the ocean and take a sample of pigment from the ocean to then paint the ocean with were limited to pigments that are derived from minerals and other natural resource is Teoh. Try to replicate those colors that we see in nature. While it may feel a little bit disappointing, Teoh learn that you cannot replicate the colors of additive light with subtracted pigments . I think that it's actually a relief for US artists because our job is not to copy or mimic nature, but communicates or express nature through our own eyes. And so we can put aside that urge Teoh, replicate all of the's colors, and that freezes up really to explore the range of possibilities that we have with subtracted color
5. The Munsell Color System: As we know, color theory is quite complex, and therefore a few different systems of thinking relating to color have been developed for this course. We are going to be exploring color through the months L color system, and I will explain why this system works so well for painters, especially Albert. Mansell was an artist himself, and he was also a professor at the Massachusetts Normal Art School. He sought to create a rational way to describe color. He viewed color names as foolish and misleading, and I have to agree with this. I'll explain why in just a moment he first started working on his system in 18 98 and he published it in a full form in a book called A Color Notation. This was published in 1905 and it's very comprehensive. Rather than using subjective color names such as magenta or orange. The months L'd system describes color as violent red and red, yellow and so forth, followed by numeric descriptions that refer to the chroma and value of that color. Now it's not necessary to learn the full system, but being familiar with it in general will enable you to unleash the power of the limited palate rather than buying more colors than you actually need. So now let's talk about why I agree with months cell that color names tend to be a little bit silly or foolish. Well, there are multiple ways paint manufacturers can create a color like magenta. They might use completely different pigment combinations in various ratios, and therefore having a consistent language to describe color rather than these boutique names is a very powerful tool for artists. I talked about this a little bit in my materials course on oil painting, but basically there are no standardization ins for how manufacturers create colors that they may call turquoise or sap green. While some color names refer to the actual pigments used to create them, not all of them do. And so it's very, very important to understand that we can refer to color in a more rational way to better understand it. I also prefer the Munsil system because the traditional color wheel that we are basically taught from kindergarten on up describes colors in very convenient divisions of threes, and this causes it to show compliments that actually don't combined to create a neutral gray the Munsil system uses a division of 10 and shows each you directly across from its exact compliment. Thes exact compliments combined to create a neutral gray, and I will demonstrate this shortly. So while no color system is going to be absolutely perfect, I prefer the Munsil system because it's been wanted by artists since its inception, as it most accurately describes the way humans perceive additive light and the way that pigments interact with each other. So now let's talk about a little controversy when it comes to our color wheel. Most of us were taught from a young age that complementary colors combined to create gray. However, in practice, this has often frustrated budding young artists, including myself. So let's take a look at why this is a flawed system created out of convenience rather than accuracy. Here on the left, I have created a color wheel diagram that symbolizes the traditional color wheel, and I've also included little areas where I could have value and chroma included in this color wheel, and it looks pretty good, right? Well, one thing really bothers me about this, and that is the fact that the complementary colors on this color wheel do not always combine to create a nice neutral gray. Now the color wheel over on the right is what I've designed to represent the months L Color Wheel. And now I'm going to show you a little demonstration as to why these color wheels are a little bit different and how that makes such a big impact on the way that we mix paint. So here you can see that I have a chart, and I'm going to combine red and green and try to get a neutral gray in the middle. I am using the color palette that I'll be using throughout this course. I have also yellow, ultra marine blue and the naff all red. I'm combining my yellow and my blue to create a nice, true green. I'm adding my blue in small increments to my yellow so I don't accidentally overcome my yellow and take it too far over to the blue side. So I'll just speed this up while I fiddle with it. And I think that this is a nice, true green. I hope that you'll agree. I know it's a little bit subjective, so now what I'm going to do is start adding a little bit of red. I may have to go back and forth a little bit as a mixed this because the red that I'm using is very, very powerful. You can see that when I first applied it onto my charts, it was very much leaning toward the red, so I'm going over that with some green to try to neutralize it as much as possible. But try as I might, I really don't feel like I'm getting very close to a neutral gray. It just feels way too warm. I'm adding some white here just so that you can see the relative color temperature a little bit more clearly now. Right now, this basically looks like a nice brown. But when I add the red down below, you'll see that this really is a good middle ground between that green and the red. Now, right next to this, I am going Teoh. Mix this in accordance with the Munsil color system, using more of a blue green rather than a true standard green. So I'm going to go ahead. I need a little bit more yellow on my palette, but I think that the amount of blue that I have on there already should suffice. And I am going to mix my blue into the yellow until I get a blue green that best matches the months l color system. So I can be a little bit more liberal with the amount of blue that I add in here. And you can already see when we kind of look at this mix and compare it over to that true green. We can see that this, of course, is much more of a blue green, and it also has a much darker local value to it. So let's see how this combines with red and again I will need to keep in mind that this right is extremely powerful, and so I'm just going to incrementally add red to it. Now. The local value of this color is very dark, so it's really difficult to actually see how this is going. Teoh pan out. So I'll add a little bit of white to this mix as well, so that we can a little bit better judge this color. So I think that you can already see that compared Teoh, the neutral color I created with the green and red. The neutral that I'm getting from the blue, green and red is much closer to what we would all consider to be a neutral gray. And that is why I prefer to use the Munsil color system because I can mix colors in ways that are better, predictable and easier to control and understand. And it's really not about getting to that neutral gray. It's not very often that in a painting we need a perfectly neutral gray. However, we do want to be able Teoh mix her colors with the least amount of frustration as possible . And so, in my opinion, this is a superior color system for traditional painters, and they hope that you will agree. All right, so let's take a close up look. And I hope that you'll forgive my wobbly camera here, but I just want to show you up close. How much of a difference this made now I used all of the same primary colors for both of these mixes. It's just that subtle balance that makes such a huge difference between the combinations that we get because that blue green has more blue in it. Of course, we get a much cooler temperature for our gray than we got with the green and red
6. Hue - Primary Colors for Painters: looking at graphics that depict color theory are great ways of learning the basics. But as traditional media artists weaken, sometimes feel a little bit frustrated because when confronted with the vast array of Hughes and colors that we encounter at the art store, it can be difficult to know which one to use as our primary color palette. One thing that I've learned since I started teaching painting is that students often want a list of specific colors that they need in order to take my painting class. I'm happy to share the colors that I use for my paintings so that students can follow along with me if they choose. However, what I've observed is that a lot of times students will show up to my classes with bins full of tubes of paint. And they explained to me that this has happened because every time they do a painting, workshop or class, the teacher gives them a long list of colors that they absolutely must have. And so they go out and they buy those colors, and then the next time they take a painting course, they get another list, and maybe there's some of the same colors on this new list, but likely there's a whole bunch of other colors that are just absolute musts for this course. Well, I've never really thought about color that way, and in my opinion, and the way that I tend to think in general, is that less is more and one of the most important things that I want my students toe learn through this course and my other courses is that it's not about the pigment. It is not about the paint brand. It is all about you understanding the colors that you have in order to unleash their full potential. And that's why, in this course we will use limited palettes. I'll do some demonstrations with various combinations of colors, but they'll never exceed four colors plus whites, and I in no way expects you to use the same colors that I'm using. In fact, I encourage you to embrace the colors that you already have, and commit yourself to fully understanding them and painting with a limited palettes in your early days of learning to paints. All right, now that we have that out of the way, it let's get into it and talk about pigments here on the screen, you can see three different red pigments. All of this watch is that I'm going to be showing you in this video are from the Windsor in new in website. They have a really great catalogue of colors and I really like the way that they display their colors on their website. It just makes it really easy to understand. And that's why I chose to show you Windsor in new in color swatches so you can see that we have three different reds here, a permanent luzern crimson, a cadmium red and cadmium red deep. So which of these reds is a primary red Well, spoiler alert. They all are Any red that you choose to use in your painting is your primary red and we're going to define our primary colors as the colors from which you mix all other colors. And so you do not need to worry about which read which yellow which blue you're going to just use what you have or use what you want to achieve certain effects. So rather than concerning ourselves with which read is a primary red, we're really going to just concern ourselves with the properties of the pigment that you choose to use. So now let's take a look at a couple different examples of yellows. It's easy to understand that in Indian yellow is going to mix with an ultra marine blue in a different way than a cadmium. Lemon Yellow is going to mix with an ultra marine blue, and that is what we truly want to understand when working with our own primary colors. And very often we can actually use a limited palate. Teoh very closely get to other colors that are not even on our palate, and I will be demonstrating that for you shortly. Let's take a look now, though, at thes beautiful blue pigments and how they vary from one another. Here's a couple of green pigments. Of course, there's so many, they're all very unique. And here are some neutrals. I consider neutrals and greens to be optional, and you can certainly achieve a full range of color with just three primaries. But let's just take a look at the difference between some of these neutral pigments. Burnt sienna is much more red and much warmer, obviously than the Paynes grey. The difference between burnt umber and raw number is basically that burn number is just a little bit warmer, while raw number is a little bit cooler. Personally, I really like to use raw number to mix with my ultra marine blue to create a nice chromatic black. When we look at the different whites that are typically available to us, the differences between these are very, very subtle. However, most artists tend to use titanium white or flake white. Just keep in mind that Flake white does contain lead, which is toxic. Most artists avoid zinc white not because of the color, but because when it hardens, it becomes brittle and it's prone to cracking. And so that is also something you want to understand about your pigments. Now let's take a look at a couple of blacks personally. I don't paint with black out of the tube very often, but that is not to say that you can't or shouldn't. Let's just look at some of the subtle differences between these blacks. Ivory black tends to be a very neutral black, which is very commonly used. Mars black, you can see, is very warm and lamp black as much cooler. So let's take a look at some examples of limited palettes you might choose to use. The important thing here is that there's nothing special about the combinations of these particular colors. I basically just took the swatches that I collected from the Windsor and New and Website and combined them so that I have three different limited palettes, which contain three primary colors, plus a neutral. And if we were to create color wheels with each one of these pallets are color wheels would look a little bit different from one another. And that is what makes pigment and limited color palettes so very interesting. And you can learn so much from exploring them. Throughout this entire course, I'll be doing all of my demonstrations and projects with a limited palate. However, I do have three different limited palettes that I'll be utilizing throughout this course, and I want to tell you just a little bit about them. The limited palette that you see furthest over to the left is my workhorse. That's what I'll be using for the majority of the demonstrations in this course, and then the limited pellet in the middle. I'll be using for a few exercises and the limited palate over on the far right. I'll be using just a little bit to contrast it with my primary limits had pallets, So let's take a closer look at each one of these. Here is the limited palette that I used for most of this course, and I have just dubbed this my most primary palate because I think that these colors best represent what we tend Teoh think of in our minds as primary colors. So this is going to be all colors that are created by em. Gram and my right is a NAFTA Allred. It's a very warm red, an azo yellow, which is kind of a neutral yellow, and then an ultra marine blue, which I consider to be a cool blue and then in some demonstrations. All also use raw number in order to create a chromatic black when I combine it with ultra marine blue. The key features of this palette are that this is the closest thing that I could come up with with the palette that I have available to your typical idea of primary subtracted colors. The red is considered a warm red because it's a little bit closer to orange than it is to magenta. On the color spectrum, this red is very strong and powerful. It easily overpowers other colors that I combine it with. It's also very opaque. My ultra marine blue and as a yellow are very con are very transparent. By contrast, all of these colors are very light fast, meaning that they won't fade much when exposed to UV lights. The red and the blue and this palette create a very muted violet. So if I wanted a really vibrant and strong violet, I probably wouldn't use this particular palette for that. It also creates a very nice true green, and it creates a strong orange. This is a great color palette for every subject. It's very versatile, and, as I said, I use raw number to create a chromatic black with the ultra marine blue. Another limited palette that I'll be using is what I call my c m y que palate, because thes air the colors I had at my disposal that are closest to cyan, magenta and yellow. So these air very bright and vibrant colors, and it is important to know that this magenta that I have is very weak. It takes a lot of it to mix with other colors to make a good impact. Magenta also tends not to be very light fast, meaning that it will fade over time when exposed to UV light. And that's why I probably wouldn't use this particular palette to do a lot of painting because I wouldn't want all of my reds to fade over time. Now the fellow turquoise is very strong and powerful. Both the magenta and turquoise are very transparent, while the cadmium lemon is semi trans. Parents thes create a strong violet, a very vibrant green and a somewhat weak orange may be weaker than I expected. This is a great color palette to paint manmade subjects like artificial lighting cars that are painted bright colors or colored glass, etcetera. Now my next palate is what I call my warm pallets. I call it that because I would tend to use this combination of colors to create very nice warm paintings, such as a nice tropical ocean or a summer day with lots of greens. So these are also very bright and vibrant colors. I'll be using permanent rose, which is a little bit closer to magenta than it is toe orange. All of these colors are very light fast. The fellow blue is a very strong and powerful color. Both the permanent rose and the fellow blue are very transparent, while the cadmium lemon is a little bit more opaque but still transparent enough to be considered a semi transparent color. This creates a very typical violet that you might expect to see. It creates a nice, true green. It also creates a strong orange. This is a great color palette, as I said, for warm landscapes and ocean scenes or scenes that contain a lot of bright greens. I'll be using this palette, basically just to contrast in a few demos from my primary palette that I'm using in this course again. None of this is to say that these air the colors that you need to use for this course. I just wanted to give you some insight as to why I chose these particular colors
7. Hue - Chromatic Black: I've talked a little bit about chromatic black, and in this video I'm going to demonstrate to you why I prefer to mix my own black rather than using blacks out of the tube. Now, this is a black that came with a set. And so I have it laying around. It is useful for things such as value studies, but I personally don't tempt, tend to use black in my every day. Normal painting. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going Teoh, compare both a an ivory black, which is very common black the artists like to use with my chromatic black. So the first thing that I have here on my palate is my ivory black and the next to it, I'm placing my raw number. And then I will next to that place, my ultra marine blue, and I'm going to be combining those two colors to create my chromatic black. But first I'm going to demonstrate with my ivory black witches again over on the left, and I'm going Teoh basically create a value scale, just a three step value scale with each of these different blacks. So I'm going to also use a little bit of titanium white here to then mix a medium and light value for the ivory black and so we can see that we get summat nice increments of gray here with the ivory black. So now I'm going to mix my raw number and my ultra marine blue. And of course, the local value of this combination is very, very dark. So it's difficult to see if I have enough of each color because I really want Teoh. Try my best to get to a nice middle neutral grave. But I'm going to do something with my chromatic black a little bit different than I did with my ivory black. And that is I'm going to create different temperatures off this black so I can create a cool black. By adding more of my ultra Marine blue, I can add more of my raw number to get a warmer black. And then, of course, I can always get pretty close to just your standard black out of the tube by mixing them in equal proportions. So I actually got lucky, and I did pretty well. I think that this is actually a pretty nice middle gray here so I'm gonna go ahead and kind of divide this up and add a little bit of white. So I get those three value steps with this nice middle gray with the chromatic black and you can see it's very close Teoh what I was able to achieve with the Ivory Black. But now I'm going to further divide thes and so over on the left side, I'm going to mix a cool black and then on the right, I'll have a warmer black. So now I've got these divided into three different columns. And oh, I was wrong, actually, over on the left is going to be my warm black, So I've added some of that raw number into that mix. Adding it into that middle value as well. Probably have to add some white to this because the value got reduced quite a bit when I added that we'll just go ahead and add some more of that raw number two the lighter value as well. All right, so then I'm going to basically do the same thing in that column over on the right. I'll just be adding more ultra marine blue into each mix rather than more of the raw number . So this way I will have a much cooler black for this column. And then I'm going to go ahead and just kind of swatch these over right next to the Ivory Black again, with the darker values, it's really difficult to actually see any difference. But then as we move down, you can see that this is a much warmer black, and now we'll move over to the next one. This is my neutral medium black, so you can see that's very close to what I achieved with the Ivory Black out of the two. And then, of course, last is my cool black. So let's take a little bit of a closer look at these again, A little bit of wobbling here with the camera. All right, so let's get fighting to focus, and you can really see that by mixing my own black. I just have a lot more control over the temperature of my black, and I can push it whichever way I might happen to need it. It's not very often that I really need a truly neutral black or grey, and so I find it very useful just to mix my own black with these very common colors and to be able to have a little bit more control over it, and I find it a little bit more interesting as well. But of course, you should feel free to do whatever feels best for you, but
8. Hue - Limited Palette, Unlimited Possibilities: in this video. I just want to further demonstrate to you that you do not need to go out and buy tubes of every color of paint available. Very often, you'll be surprised at how close you're able to get to some of the tube colors that you might buy with very surprising source colors or primary colors. So for this demonstration, I purpose purposefully chose the brightest and most vibrant tubes of paint that I happened tohave. And yes, even though I do advocate for a very limited palate, I've still overtime accumulated tons of tubes of pains. The trick to a limited palate is not to be an absolute minimus minimalist and toe only own a few tubes of paints, although that is totally amazing as well. And I encourage that if you're new to painting so that you're not spending a lot of money on paints. But you can use just a limited combination of colors for your limited palette. You don't have to use every color that you own, and as a beginner, you really should not. So for this demonstration, I wanted to show that I can use my most vibrant and vivid colors and I can create colors that are very close to some of the more earthy tones that you might buy in a tube. So first I have my cadmium lemon over there on the left. Now I have magenta, which you can see is very bright. This is kind of standing in for my red, and then for my blue, I'm going to be using a fellow turquoise. I don't have a color that is called scion, and truly there is no pigment. That can be a true sigh in. So I figured that this was probably close enough. It's a very bright blue. It's not a blue that we see in nature. Ah, lot. And so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to combine thes colors in ways that are going to actually mimic some more earthy colors such as yellow, Oakar, burnt sienna and meridian. So now that I have the pure colors, swatch here on the top, I'm going to go ahead and combine these into secondary colors. So, of course I'm going to mix a green first by combining my yellow and my fellow turquoise and you see that we get a really bright and vivid green. I don't know when you would ever see a green like this truly in nature. Even the brightest green leaves are not truly going to be this vivid. So we're gonna go ahead and swatch this underneath the blue. The next secondary color that we are going to be mixing is going to be the magenta. And we will add the fellow turquoise to this. So this is going to be our violets and again once you see this on paper, because this is very transparent. So even though it looks very dark on my palette, once I put it on my white paper, the white of the paper will show through this transparent paints and you'll be able to see how bright and vibrant this violence is. So here it is, right in the middle. We're going to place this underneath our magenta. And then, of course, the last secondary color that we need to mix is going to be our orange. So we're going to combine the cadmium lemon yellow with the magenta. Now the cadmium lemon yellow is a very strong, powerful pigment. I'll end up actually basically using all of my magenta too even get close to an orange. You can see that even though I've added magenta a couple of times, it's still very strongly yellow. This is another advantage of using a limited palate because you're going to get to know these properties of your colors. They don't combine equally. You're gonna have some colors that are very powerful, and you won't need very much of them to impact other colors. And then you're weaker colors. You're going to have to use a greater quantity to make a dent on the colors you're mixing it with. So here I am, swatch ing my orange right underneath my yellow. And now we are going to get into the interesting part of this little experiments. So the first thing that I'm going to dio is divide my orange, and what do you think that I might combine this with but green? So my orange and my green and we're just going to mix this up? I'm adding my green in with small, incremental quantities again because it has that fellow turquoise in it. It's going to be much more powerful than the colors that make my orange, but what I want to do is just find a nice middle ground between those two secondary colors . Now I am mixing the rest of that orange with the violet, and I'll probably have to mix up a little bit more color here because I've already run out completely of my orange and this violet may overpower that orange. It's not a particularly strong orange, to be quite honest, so I have a very small quantity of paint here that I'm trying to mix, so I am gonna have to just add a little bit more. I believe we will see about that. But in the meantime, I'm gonna go ahead and take the rest of the violet that I have, and I'm going to combine it with the green, so I'm just gonna speed this up a little bit. I had to add a little bit more because I ran out of some of that pain. So, yes, I'm going to remix a little bit of this violet. The blue really overpowered that magenta, as you can see, so probably have to get out a little bit more magenta. There we go. Now we need to mix up a little bit more, Orange says. I said. I just kind of didn't have enough quantity here. I didn't wanna waste any pain. So sometimes its safer just to squeeze out less than you think that you need. So you can add more rather than squeezing out more than you're going to need because you can't put paint back in the tube. So I'm gonna go ahead and mix up that orange plus violet again. And now we're going to swatch These so I'm going to put the color that we mixed underneath the orange in that column, which goes with the yellow and the orange. This is going to be my yellow Oakar. Next we have the violet plus green. This is going to be my burnt sienna. And then finally we have the green plus violet. This is going to be meridian. So I actually happen to have those colors in tubes. And so I'm going to actually play swatches of the colors straight from the tube underneath the colors that I've mixed here. And you're going to see how close we can get using these really vivid, almost neon artificial colors to get very, very close to some of the most common earth colors that you might need. And all of this is just to illustrate that truly, you do not need to go out and buy every tube of paint that contains the color that you want to be able to achieve. So often we at least can get in the ballpark just by unleashing the power of a limited palate and learning how to control these colors. Learning the properties of these colors, their strengths and their weaknesses, and how they combined together in unique and interesting ways. When I do these swatches, I do like Teoh kind of put labels on here so that when you refer back to them in the future , I can easily recall what I used so over on the left have added some yellow car straight from the tube, burnt sienna straight from the tube and meridian straight from the tube. And I'm just gonna swatch these directly underneath the colors that I mixed. And then I'll show you up close so that you can see how truly close we were able to get. And this is just one small example, of course, and so I challenge you. Next time you see a tube of paint that you really like, but you don't yet own. Try to see if you can figure out how to mix it. It does take some trial and error, and sometimes as you go along, you'll inadvertently mix of color. And so when you do that, just take a mental note of how you got there. All right, so let's take a closer look here. Let's make sure everything's in focus so you can see that the colors straight from the tubes are very close to the colors that I was able to mix from these really bright, vibrant colors. And again, this is just to show you that even with a very limited palate, you have so many possibilities for your color options, So embrace it and learn it. Now let's go on.
9. How to Use the Color Wheel Template: for the month cell color wheel. I have created a template for you, which you confined in the resource section of this course, and you can download that and print it off. And I'm going to demonstrate in this video how you can transfer that to your own substrate to paint. I will be using this oil primed paper to create my color wheel. You can use any substrate that you want. I would recommend, though, trying to find some substrate that doesn't have too much texture. It'll just make your life a little bit easier. And because I got this paper off of a role, I definitely need a way to keep it flat. So it's not constantly rolling up on me. So I basically just found a board and amusing some paperclips just to clip it onto this board. Teoh. Keep it in place. It will make life so much easier. Now. The paper that I'll be painting my color wheel onto is 12 inches by 12 inches, and the printer that I have at home definitely does not print that larger only will print 8.5 inch wide pieces of paper. So what I did was, I basically just printed my color wheel onto two sheets of paper. One contains the top of the color wheel, and then the other sheet contains more of the bottom of the color wheel. And, of course, I don't need to overlap this too much because I'm going to be using carbon paper to transfer. So I don't wanna have to press any harder than I need to. So I'm just going to cut off the excess from the bottom sheets. And then I'm going to match these two sheets up. And so my color wheel at this point is approximately, I'd say 11 inches in diameter. So basically the with or I guess it would be the length of a typical she of printer paper. And now I'm just going to use a masking tape. Teoh put these two pieces together, and now I have a nice big color wheel toe work with. Of course, you don't need to do this if you don't want to go through the trouble of trying to match everything up and just keep your color wheel a little bit smaller, it would totally work if you just wanted to do this on like an eight inch by a inch substrate, and then it should fit onto just one single sheet of paper. Now this is called carbon paper or graphite paper or transfer paper. It's very inexpensive, and I use the stuff a lot, so I would definitely recommend that this is something that you should just have around. It's really nice. As I said, very, very cheap. You get several sheets of it and one single sheet last a really long time. You could probably tell by looking at the black side of these sheets that I've used these a lot and I'm still able to use them. And most of the sheets of carbon paper that I bought in my pack have never even been used, even though I've owned this four years. So this is a really great tool for artists. I do lots and lots of transferring for various projects, and it just makes life easier. And I really like making life easier. So the rest of this is fairly straightforward and simple. I'm placing my template on top of my substrates, taping it into place so it doesn't budge as I go around and transfer all of the lines and now I need to place my carbon paper with the dark side facing my substrate. That is very important because we're going to apply pressure and the carbon on the black side of the carbon paper is going to then be transferred onto my oil primed paper. And what I usually do is I use a colored pen or pencil so that I can more easily see where I've already gone over. Technically, you don't have to use any kind of writing utensil to do this. You can use any tool that just applies pressure, but the downside to doing that works using like a pencil or a black pen is that you won't be able to as easily see where you've already made your marks. So basically all I have to do is go around the color wheel, applying pressure to all of these lines. I kind of do it in a systematic fashion, so I'll first go over all of the circles and then I will go over all of the radiating lines and then last I'll go over all the lines that cross that so I can ensure that everything is transferring and also If you tape your template into place, then you can actually lift up the paper and peek underneath just to make sure you haven't missed anything. Or if there's some areas where you need to apply a little bit more pressure may be part of your carbon. Paper is just a little bit more used up than other parts, and so it's not transferring his dark. Ah, I would recommend just taking a look at your transfer before you take the tape off of your template, just so you don't have to worry about tryingto line it all up again, which could be very difficult if you don't have transfer paper right now. You can also do a transfer by using a light box as long as you're substrate is thin enough for the light to be able to penetrate. And you might even be able just to press everything up against the window that has a lot of light coming in and kind of getting a light box effect. All right, so this is basically it for the transfer. It's very simple, and it is nice because if you end up wanting to redo the project for any reason, You won't have to worry about re drying everything. It's just a matter of tracing it, and now we're ready to paint.
10. Munsell Color Wheel - Anatomy: If you've taken a couple of my other skill share courses, you've probably painted a color wheel or two. And in this class we also have a color wheel. However, this is truly the ultimate color wheel. I've designed this color wheel based on the months l color system, so we're going tohave representations of Hue, Kromah and Value all comprised into a single color wheel. And I've created this template and made it available to you for free. Here you can go to the resource is section of this course and download it prints it off. And then I will be showing you in another video how to transfer this on to your substrate so that you can easily paint this color wheel. And this is going to be such a useful tool for you moving forward. And in this video, I'm going Teoh, just show you how we're going to proceed through the painting of this color wheel. We'll proceed through it in a logical order that will simplify. The process will start out, of course, with our primary colors. Whatever you choose is your read your yellow and your blue. Now you can easily see that these are not evenly spaced across from each other, as in the traditional color wheel. So you may want to actually have your template next to you as you paint, so that you don't lose track of the placement of the colors. Next, of course, are going to be our secondary colors our orange, green and violets. Rather than using the word orange, I have labelled this as red yellow. So the letters on this color wheel refer Teoh the combination of the primary colors all right, and the next we have our tertiary colors and you can just do these tertiary colors if you'd like or you can dio also the smaller circles in between. And I've made those smaller just so you know that they're not is important. But if you want to explore the full spectrum, I encourage you to go ahead and experiment with those. And this is the result that you'll get. Now we are going Teoh, explore Chroma. There wasn't a lot of room on this color wheel to have Kromah, and we're going to actually spend a lot of time on chroma in this class. So I'm compensating for that here and in the center. We have representations of the chroma of each primary and secondary and tertiary color. In the actual demonstration, I'll go into more detail about how to mix these reduced chroma colors. But I just want you to notice that at the outer edge of the inner circle we have a reduced chromatic color that's just slightly reduced. And then as we work toward the center, we want to work more toward the most that neutral or muted colors so closer to a neutral gray and then right in the center. Our goal is to get a nice, neutral, perfect gray. Next, we will look at using shade now for this color wheel. We are just going to use a black and there are lots of ways Teoh shade your colors other than just black. But for the color wheel, we do have to keep it a little bit simple, and the same goes for tinting our colors with white to get the lighter values. So the outer edge of this color wheel we will reserve for our tents, and you don't have to get to perfect whites. You also don't have to get to perfect black when we're doing our values. So if you choose not to do all of the tertiary colors, this is what your final color wheel will look like. It's very nice and it's going to be very useful and also beautiful. And here's what it would look like if you completed all of those tertiary colors as I will demonstrate in this course. So I encourage you to take this color wheel just one step at a time, and don't rush through it.
11. Munsell Color Wheel - Hue: all right, so we are ready to start painting our color wheel. I know that my lines are a little bit faint, but hopefully you can see those well enough. And then I have my naff all red up at the top of my palette, my as a yellow over on the right and my ultra marine blue down on the lower left of my palettes. My ultra marine blue is very oily, and so it's always dripping off of my palette when I prop up my palate vertically. And, of course, I do this just so that you can actually see my palette as I mix in the same screen that you're seeing where in painting. So I don't typically paint with my palate vertical like this, and so you don't need to worry about doing that. I will be using my walnut Alcon medium as I do this, because that is going to first of all, make the pain a little bit easier to manipulates, and it's also going to make the paint dry much faster. And I will tell you that I did my color wheel over the course of a couple of days. So after I got all of my Hughes in place. I waited a day for everything to dry so that when I went on to the other parts of the color wheel, I didn't have to worry as much about putting my arm into wet paint and smearing it all over the place. So that's just a little aside now, when we're doing color swatches, it is pretty important to clean off your brush in between colors. And the reason that I started out with my yellow is just because yellow tends to be the color that is most easily corrupted if you accidentally have a little bit of pigment from other colors still in your brush. So when my brushes my cleanest, that's when I tend to do my yellows. But I always clean up my brush in between colors. So here we have all of our primary colors, and we're going to go on with Our secondary colors are violets, our orange and are green. So the first I'm going to mix is going to be the violet. So I'm using my ultra marine blue, and I'm going to just slowly start adding in my naff all red again. I can't emphasize enough that even though I'm very familiar with these pigments at this point, I never seem to fail to not add too much red. And so then I have to go back in with a lot of blue to try to balance it out. That red is very, very powerful. And so it's best, Thio added, in very small quantities and to be able to judge that balance, and that's going to be easier to see in person than it is here on camera. Now, of course, I know we've talked a little bit about the local value of colors, and violet tends tohave the darkest local value, and that makes it really difficult to actually see the true color of it. It's going to be much easier to judge that when we are tinting it with white. But for the purpose of this color wheel, we really don't want to add any white because, of course, these are representing our most pure Hughes that we can get and so we want to stay true. Teoh the natural local value of thes Hughes in their purest form. So I will say this again throughout this section. It can be a little bit frustrating, and you might find yourself, just like with your nose up to your painting, trying to determine the exact color of these mixes that have a very dark local value. But as long as you are incremental thing, these in a logical way, it is going to end up making sense. So trust in the process don't get frustrated. It's all going toe work out also. Of course, I do just want to apologize for my big, fuzzy head being in the corner of the screen for a lot of this. I really couldn't avoid it because I had a hard time actually seeing where I was placing colors. This is actually Ah, I think the third time that I did this demonstration, I tried doing it with my palate more horizontal. But I just really could not see where I was painting on all of these small swatches. So I do have a little bit of my head in the screen. I hope it doesn't bother you too much. I tried to stay as far back as I could, so let's go on with our secondary colors here, and you can see that if you choose not to do those smaller circles in between these larger circles. Then you really won't have any tertiary colors in between your reading your orange and your orange and your yellow. And that's totally fine. And that is just the way that this particular color system happens toe work out personally , it doesn't bother me too much, and I actually like it because it leaves a lot of room for exploring greens and violence. And I think that those air really important colors and they're very nuanced in with greens , especially. We see that so much in nature. And so I think it's really useful just to be able to explore the full range of greens that we might be able to get. So now I'm moving on to my tertiary colors, and if you look directly across from our primary colors, you can see that the Onley compliment that we have in place so faras between the blue and the orange. The rest of the compliments are going to be created with our primary colors. So are red and yellow and then with tertiary colors. So the compliment for red is actually a blue green, as demonstrated earlier in this course, and then the compliment that best suits yellow is actually going to be closer to a blue violets or something that you might describe as an indigo. Now, at this point in the process, I'm going to go ahead and start completing all of the smaller tertiary colors as well, so that I could just work around my palette in a logical fashion. And basically what is going to be happening on my palate is almost a replication of the color wheel on my palettes, and I was tempted just to let all of this paint dry and to hang it up as a color palettes or as a color wheel in my studio, because I think that that would be pretty neat. But I don't really have an extra palette laying around, so I couldn't let this one go to that purpose. Unfortunately, so now all I'm going to do to mix these smaller circles of tertiary colors is I'm just going to gradually merge them closer to the next subsequent color. So I've taken my blue green and added a little bit more blue to it, and I will use this to paint that next small circle and I'll be going around the color wheel in a clockwise fashion, and I will speed it up a little bit because I know that some of this gets a little bit repetitive. But I do just want you to see how I am shifting these colors as I move around the wheel. So I added a little bit more blue to that blue green and then for the next small circle, all add even more blue. And I don't have to remix this from scratch. I can just recycle that previous mix and just add a little bit more blue to it and basically weaken. Do this in between colors. But then once I get over to my pure blue, I will have Teoh make a new mix. All right, so this is my I guess I would call this a blue blue blue green because we have blue green and the next about his blue, blue green and then blue, blue, blue, green. And no, I'm not going to make you listen to me describe every single color on this color wheel like that. But I think that that's important to remember that we do have other ways to describe colors other than using boutique names such as like Turquoise or Meridian or Things like that, even though some of those colors do make sense to us, and we all sort of have a common understanding of what exactly those colors mean. But there are other ways to describe color, and I think that sometimes it gets lost in translation when we try to use boutique colors names to describe our colors. So now I am combining my ultra marine blue and my violet, and this is going to be my blue violet, which sometimes we describe as like an indigo. And then this is going to be the director compliment. As I said earlier, Teoh, my primary yellow. So I'm going to go ahead and place this in the larger circle that's in between my blue and my violets. And then I am going to proceed around the rest of this color wheel in that same way until I get back over Teoh the green side. So who? Go ahead and just speed this up a little bit. I think that you will understand the general concept basically, as I proceed closer to the next color. I'm adding more of that to my mix so that I can gradually shift each tertiary color a little bit closer, Teoh, the larger circle that is approaching. And then as I move on to a completely different color, I'm just being really careful. Teoh, make sure that I clean off my brush so that I don't contaminate that next color. That's going to be especially important when we get back into the red, orange, yellow and green, because those have in much lighter local value. And so they're much more easily contaminated by a dirty brush. You may even choose to use two different brushes and reserve one brush for colors that have a lighter local value and one brush for colors that have a darker local value. So you don't have to worry about cross contamination quite as much. All right, so here we are, almost at the very end of our Hughes, and you can see that we have a full color spectrum here. Of course, the spectrum is basically infinite, and so we're not going to replicate that exactly. And we are using a limited palettes, So if you use different colors for your limited palette. Your color wheels going toe look just a little bit different than mine. And that is okay. That's great. That is your limited palate.
12. Munsell Color Wheel - Chroma: all right, so I took the rest of the day off from this color wheel, and I'm coming back on another day after I have let my Hughes dry completely so I don't have to worry about accidentally getting my hand into those colors and smearing them all over my beautiful color wheel and a used of course, an AL could medium so that they would dry a little bit faster. And now we're going toe work on chroma a little bit, and I'm cleaning off my palate from yesterday because I'm basically not going to be using all of those colors that we nixed. We're going to be mixing fewer colors for this little exercise to go ahead and just have a clean palette. Hopefully, you still have some of your paint left from the other day, and another tip that I like to share with my students is that if you have oil paint left over from a painting session, you don't always have to scrape it down and throw it away. If you have space in a freezer where you can store your palate safely, just pop it in the freezer because that really slows down the drying time quite a bit. It won't completely stop it from drying, but it really helps, especially if you're gonna paint the next day or two. All right, so we are going to mix these reduced chroma colors here in the center. We have three swatches for each reduced chroma. Hugh, the first ones that I'm doing are going to be my red in my green. So each compliment pair I'm going to be doing simultaneously. So I've mixed up a blue green that matches the blue green on my color wheel. And I don't have to do any mixing, of course, for my red for this one, because it's just my primary red. So what I'm gonna do is take just a little bit of red and add it right into my blue green and I'll do the same over onto my red. Add just a little bit of that blue green into my red and then I'm going Teoh, divide each pile and I'll add a little bit more red here. I think that I probably overdid it with the red, so we'll have to come up with a little bit more blue green toe ad back in there so that it still leans a little bit toward that blue green hue. And then I divided my red pile into another one, and I'm adding increasingly more of my blue green. So again we'll have three steps that reduce the chroma for both of these hues. And we're basically going to do this all the way around the color wheel. And I am going to add white here just so that we can see a little bit better the balance that we have between the two complementary colors. So you can see here that I clearly have way too much red in my blue green color string here . So I need to mix up a little bit more of that blue green so I can try to balance that out again. I always struggle with this red because a tiny, tiny bit goes such a long ways. All right, so this helps a lot. I've added more of that blue green back in, and you can see that in that middle swatch. I'm going to have a pretty nice neutral gray, which I really like. All right, so I'm adding a little bit of white to the red color string, and I'm gonna go ahead and just mix up each color string. And a color string is basically just different piles of colors that progress in a very logical way. So starting out with my blue green and incrementally adding more red to it as I go down the string and get closer to a neutral. So I'm gonna mix up my color strings all at once, and then I can quickly apply them. Teoh, my color wheel. So toward the outer edge of this inner circle who play that makes sense is going to be my most chromatic color. And then as a work closer toward the center of this inner circle, that's where I want my most reduced chromatic colors. So the closer I get to gray, the closer I'm getting to the center of my color wheel. So now I'm going to move onto the next pair, which is going to be my red violet and my green. So I'm mixing a nice green here, over on the left and a red violet on the right And same thing. I'm just going Teoh, start cross contaminating these with each other as I build these color strings. Just three swatches per Hugh. Go ahead and add some white so that we could more easily see these. And then I'm going to add those so that, as they move toward the center of the color wheel, were getting increasingly more neutral, more muted. And you will find, as you do this portion of the exercise, that a lot of times your muted colors are going toe look somewhat similar to one another. So you're going to have some muted colors that lean green, some that lean orange, some that lean blue or violet, and that is really important to take no of. So this is my violet and my yellow green, and there's no wrong way to do this portion. Remember, we only have three swatches for each you Teoh neutralize, and we're going to be exploring reduced chroma colors in depth in this course. And so I think it's OK that we don't have a lot of room on our color wheel to explore neutrals. Neutrals are truly endless and infinite, and so we could really create a lot of color swatches representing all of the neutral colors, and I don't know that we could really accomplish that very efficiently, so we're not going to try. But we are going to fully explore reduced chroma colors and learn how to embrace the power of these amazing, beautiful colors. So you can see here that we do have some variety between all these neutrals. As we move closer to the center, they all become just a little bit more similar to each other. But there still are some variations, some nuances. And now we are almost at the finish line for our reduced chroma section of the color wheel . So now we're doing our orange plus are blue. And I really like doing this just because I don't have to clean off my brush quite as much doing exercises like this because we actually want cross contamination. And you'll recall earlier that I said that we're going to try to create a very nice neutral gray to fill in that center circle and basically what I'm doing after every time I mix a color string, I'm taking some of that leftover paint, and I'm combining it over into a pile on the side. I don't think that you can see it very well because my hand covers it up, but I'm basically reserving all of that extra paint and combining it. And my hope is that once all of these left over reduced chroma colors air combined, I will end up with a nice neutral gray. And so that's what I'm doing here. I've taken that left over pile, and I'm just shifting it a little bit, Making sure it's not too warm, not too cool. I want to get as close as I can to just a nice, medium neutral gray. And then I'm going to use that right there in the center of my color wheel, amounting a little bit of white to it, just so its not too dark shifting it around just a little bit. And if you actually use one of those pallets, that is a true gray color, this will be a little bit easier for you. The reason that I don't use those is actually just because I like the tactile experience of using a wood palette. I don't really like the clanking that I get on a glass palette with my palette knife, but for people who do a lot of their mixing with their brush, that may not bother them as much. I do a lot of my mixing with a palette knife, and so I prefer not to have a palette that has glass. All right, so I think that this is a pretty nice neutral gray. It might maybe benefit from being just a little bit lighter in value. But again, this isn't about perfection. This is just about exploring your particular limited palate, seeing the different ways that these colors combine and interact with one another and seeing the difference combinations that you can achieve. If you use different primary colors, your color wheels going toe look a little bit different from mine. And one thing that I know that I would like to do is to create a color wheel like this for some of the more common limited palettes that I tend to personally use. I think that it would be interesting just to compare them with one another and see how they differ. All right, so now we get to move on to values
13. Munsell Color Wheel - Value - Shade: and now we're ready to move onto values in our color wheel, and we're first going to focus on shade, which is reducing the value or darkening the value of our Hughes. And it's important to know that there are many different ways to do this. You may use Ah, black straight out of the tube. If you choose, I will be using my chromatic. Blacks will be combining my ultra marine blue with my raw number, and I'm just going to do my best. I'm not really going to worry about having a perfectly neutralized black, to be quite honest with you, because really, when you shade a color, you are inherently changing it anyway. And that is very evident when we decrease the value of colors like yellow or orange, which you'll see in just a little bit. So I also want you to know that using black or even chromatic black is not the only way to reduce the value of a color recall again that each Hugh is going toe have avery particular local value, for example, you can very clearly see that yellow has a very light local value, especially when we compare it to it's compliments, which is blue violet, which has a very dark local value. So if I wanted to reduce the value of, say, yellow, I could reduce the value and the chroma by using that blue violet or a blue or even a green . In fact, even if I add red or orange to yellow, I am going to be reducing the value. Yes, I'm also changing the color. Maybe I end up with a green or more of an orange or more of a gray, but that is something that is inevitable when we are changing the value of a color. We are also changing the color itself. Recall that both white and black paints are made with pigments. Blacks tend to be very cool, maybe like a blue violet or I'm a blue or even a dark green, and that is going to change the color that we mix with it. And that's just a little bit more evident with yellow, because yellow is unique in that it has the lightest local value, and it's the easiest to contaminate. It exposes the underlying colors off those Hughes that have a darker local value, So the first color that I'm going to work on here is my red. I'm gonna work around this color wheel in a clockwise fashion again, and for this one, I am just going. Teoh end up flipping my color wheel upside down once I get to the bottom of the color wheel , just because I don't want to be reaching my hand over the fresh pains again, I've taken my time in doing my color wheel. Over the course of a couple of days, I'm using a walnut oil al could so that my paint dries much faster. Usually, if I just wait 24 hours, it's pretty well dry. At the worst, it's a little bit sticky, but it doesn't really come off if I touch it. And that will just make your life a lot easier when you're doing this. And as I said, you may not even want to do your color wheel as large. Is this so if you have a very small color wheel, I would really encourage you just to really take your time, do this section by section, allow it to dry in between and then come back to it for a couple of minutes because otherwise this actually can get a little bit tedious now. I think that doing swatches and color wheels is very relaxing. I like to put on some music and just kind of chill and focus on the mixing. But I realized that if I tried to sit down and do this entire color wheel and one day, I would probably get frustrated and we don't want that. So if you need to take some extra time to complete this project, I really encourage you to do that so you can see that basically, what I did was I mixed a color string with my red. I started out with red, and I added a little bit of my chromatic black to it. I divided that into a new pile, and then I begin Teoh, add more and more of my chromatic black until I reached a very dark value closer to the center. And there's no expectation that you have to reach the value of black when you get to the end or the inner edge of your value scale. Just get it much darker than where you started and you are on the right track. There's no right or wrong way to do this. Unless, of course, you are adding white. I don't know why you would do that. Alright, So I've moved on to orange. I mixed up my color string and now I'm going to apply it again in the same fashion. So the next value beyond the local value, which is the pure orange, is going to be placed. And as I worked closer to the center, I'm going to be placing the darker values. And then, of course, my darkest value belongs right there at the center. And then as I move on to yellow, you're really going to see the effects of how shading impacts the color. It's going to basically right away, turn into green and that is OK. Just don't let it bother you. It won't be as evident with any of the other colors once you get beyond a yellow. So here we go. We're just moving our way around, getting closer and closer to the bottom, getting closer to that blue green and then I'm going. Teoh, go ahead and flip this upside down. There we go so that I don't read risk putting my arm into my wet paint, which is definitely something that I end up doing all the time anyway, especially when I have my palate over here. Vertical Teoh, my substrate. I end up putting my hand and my arm into my pain all the time. All right. So as we move into the side of the color wheel, where the local value is much darker, I do want to just reiterate that you're not going to see a huge difference as you add a darker value to these colors because they're already very dark. But I would just encourage you to trust in the process. Just keep incrementally, adding more of your black. And then, if you look really closely after you apply these watches, you are going to see a very subtle shift in value. So take your time with it. Don't worry too much about having even steps in between every single value. Just do the best that you can, because as you go, you're going Teoh learn how to control that value a little bit more, and these colors, with a dark local value, are going to be a lot more fun to tent than they are to shade. So let's go ahead and move on toe are lighter values. Shall we
14. Munsell Color Wheel - Value - Tint: all right, so we are on the home stretch with our Munsil Color System color wheel, and the last portion that we need to complete is the value where we increase the value or lighten the value by tenting our colors and, of course, our color wheel. Being a simplified model of all of these concepts, we are just going to use white to tend to our colors and increase the value of them. And just know that that is not the only way to light in the value of your colors again, just as when we went to dark in a color, we can use a black, or we can use another color that has a comparatively darker local value. We can do the same for our tents. Weaken. Use a color that has a lighter local value toe light in our color. Now, of course, this will change the color. If you want to use yellow to light in the value of your violet. Of course, you are going to get a different color. But keep in mind, of course, that white is also a color, and so we're always changing the color when we mix another pigment in with it. But the effects will be different depending on whether you use white toe light in your value or ah, color with a light local value. Now, one thing that I do want to say about tents because this is something that I struggled with a long time, and I know that other people do, too. We tend to think that values that we observe are lighter than they actually are, and we tend to overdo it on the whites when we mix our colors and our values. And the results of this is that sometimes we get a composition that feels chalky or dead or lifeless, and this is something, as I said, that took me a long time toe. Learn that. First of all, we have a bias when we're judging values where we tend to think that they are lighter than they really are. But then also, we can avoid a chalky feeling by lightning many of our values using a color with a lighter local value, and this is going to feel strange at first. But I do want you to give it a chance because especially when you are lightning, a color that is maybe a red in its local color. If you add right to it, you're going to change that color. You're going to make it look a little bit pink, and it may be more appropriate, actually, to lighten that red with a yellow. Yes, it's orange, and you may not see that as orange at first glance. But a lot of times that is the way to increase the values that you're using without taking away from the chroma. And sometimes and orange is just a light red. All right, so let's talk a little bit more about this color wheel after I m finished with that little aside for you just something to consider. All right, so this portion of the color wheel is actually, I think, the easiest. First of all, it's on the outside of the color wheel, and so it's more easily accessible, and it's a little bit easier to mix as well, especially when we're working in these colors that have a very dark local value. Adding White really brings them toe life and allows us to get a little bit more gratification from all of this mixing and the other thing that I like about doing the values is that as we move around the color wheel and again, I'll be moving around the color wheel in a clockwise fashion, starting with that blue and my color wheel. At this point, it's still upside down from when I did all of my shades. So that's why I'm doing this side first and moving my way around. And as I get closer, of course, to the violets, I'm just adding a little bit of red into the blue mixes, so I don't have to start all over with these mixes every time I move on to a different hue . So as I move again closer to my violets, I'm just adding increasingly more red until I get to that red violet. And then when I get to my pure red hue, all I have to do is scrape everything down and kind of start that process over again as I move over to yellow once I get to yellow, of course, I just get to start adding a little bit of blue into the mix until I'm back at my blue green. So I think that this is a really nice, fine, gratifying finish to this whole process, and I really encourage you to stick with this project. I know that it can feel a little bit overwhelming, but as I've said before, take your time with it. Take it one step at a time because this is a really great powerful tool, and we're going to be referring back to this color wheel in this class, so I encourage you. Teoh, do it, Keep it around. It doesn't need to be perfect by any means. This is a way for you just to begin experimenting and learning to control different aspects of color. And these skills are so important to you as a painter as you move forward. Not only is this a great tool, but it is beautiful if I do say so myself. And I personally love hanging up all of my swatches and charts and color wheels all over my studio because it makes them accessible so I can refer to them easily. And it's also a really nice decor
15. The Finished Color Wheel + Process Overview: all right, so we have completed our months l color system color wheel. Let's take a close up and personal look at this so that you can see some of the nuances. I especially want to show you some of the areas in the value shade where you actually can see some difference even in the hues that have a darker local value. And I think it's important to appreciate that and to take a close look at what you've done because it's a lot of work. This convey be a very challenging project. And of course, I also really encourage you to always label these using the colors that you chose to paint it with and also just make a know of the brand because, as I said before, the manufacturers of paints they do vary a little bit even, you know, to ultra marine blues from two different manufacturers could be just a little bit different . And the value of doing this is not only to learn about color theory, but you're also beginning to learn about the properties of the hues that you are choosing to paint within your limited palate. So let's take a close up look and really appreciate this. And of course, you can see all the little imperfections. But do not let that bother you. That is going Teoh. Just take a back seat to the greater good that you have done here, and when you step back, you really don't see those flaws. But let's really will take a look at some of the darker values that we created, especially on these colors that have a dark local value. So when we get up close and personal, we can see these very nuanced and subtle shifts in value. And it's important to recognize that and to appreciate it, because when you are staring at your palate and your mixing with a palette knife, it can be really hard to tell if you're on the right track. But I promise, as long as you are increasing the amount of the dark color that you add to it, you are going Teoh change the value of that color, even if it has a dark local value, and the same goes on the other side of the coin, where it can feel a little bit difficult. Teoh light in the value of a color like yellow without just making it disappear and become almost a zweiten as the paper. So I hope that you were able to appreciate this process. I hope that you learned a lot, and I hope that you're proud of your months l color wheel. Now let's just take a quick look back at this whole process because I don't know about you . But after I've worked on something for a couple of days and spent a lot of time on it, it feels really gratifying just to kind of recall that process and know how much work really went into it. To be quite honest with you, painting something like this takes more time than doing a lot of the full, complete paintings that I dio because you have to be so careful not only about your mixing , but also about the placement of your colors. And I think I mentioned before that I actually had to paint this color wheel a couple of times because I would make little mistakes or I would dip my whole arm into somewhat pay and smear it all over the place. Maybe that's just me. I hope that you have good luck painting this color wheel. I hope that you enjoy it. As I said, my best times painting sometimes are just when I am focusing on the task at hand. Maybe I have something toe listen to in the background. Or actually, for a lot of the days that I spent making this course, it was raining outside, and I got to just open up my back door and listened to the gentle rain falling outside of my studio as a painted swatches. And I know that I'm going to remember that for my entire life and recall it any time that I just need Teoh. Relax. So again, enjoy the process. If you find yourself feeling frustrated at any point, that is a sign that you need to take a break, and taking breaks is very important. It's important to get up to move around. Teoh give not just your body arrests, but your eyes arrest as well. And I think here you can see more clearly than ever that you also are going to gain some interesting paintbrush acrobatic tricks to do this, especially if you are in a situation like me, where it's not too easy to just maneuver your color wheel around as you work your way around it. But I actually would encourage you to work on this in a way where you can kind of turn things around as you need so that you're comfortable and you can see very clearly what you are doing. And, of course, please do share with us in the project section of this course your color wheel. It is going to be so interesting to see all of the different results that we get using different colors. And that's another really great reason to explore your own limited palate rather than trying to use the exact same colors as another artist, because maybe you're working on a very similar project. But you're going to get a different result just because of the ways that your colors interact with one another. Compared to that other artists colors. And in this way we can begin Teoh get a sense of colors we might want to use from others
16. Chroma - Limited Palette Swatch Chart: Creating a full Munsil color wheel is an excellent way to begin to understand that your limited palate, however, it is a little bit time consuming and tedious. And so, if you want to try out more than one limited color palettes, there is a more efficient way. Teoh, at least get a general bird's eye view of what that palate can do and how those colors will interact with each other. And so what I'm doing here is laying out a very simple swatch charts, and this will be a template that is available for you in the project section of this course so you can download it if you'd like. The idea behind this is that we will use up Teoh four colors plus whites and document how these interact with each other. And we also have a little bit of space to explore the values, at least a light value, a dark value and then the local value of the mixture. So what I have here is just my basic limited palate laid out, and what I'm going to do is where every color intersex I'm going to create a mixture of those two colors, so right now, I don't need to make any kind of mixture at all, because this is just where the two reds intersect. I have a red over on the column side and then a read on the row side. So I'm just going to put in a red with nothing else mixed into it. And here on this larger section, this is where I want to place the local value of my mixture. So I don't want to mix in a black or a white right here, but then right underneath it, That's where I want to mix in my black. So I have my chromatic black here over on the right hand side of my palettes, and I don't need to make it very dark. In fact, I don't really want to make it too dark because I still want to be able to clearly see the color. So I'm just going to take a little bit of my red, and I'm using my walnut al kid medium just so that this will dry a little bit faster, and it also helps the paint to be just a little bit more malleable. And then I will place this darker value just right underneath the local value of this red. And now I have a shade version of this color. Next, I want to have my tent. So I'm just taking a little bit more red and adding a little bit of white to it. Of course, I washed out my brush in between so that I would make sure I don't have any of the dark paint in here. And I'm gonna go ahead and just sample this here in my chart. I want to make sure that with the white, of course, I also don't need to go to light with it. But I do want it to be significantly different from the local value. So now, as I move on, I'm now mixing my red color with my yellow, of course to create an orange and then a shade of that orange. And one thing that I really tried to keep in mind as I did this swatch chart was that I tried Teoh have my dominant color for each mixture be the color on the row. So, for example, for this row that I'm working on right now, I want to read to be a little bit more dominant. And then, as I move throughout the charts, I will sometimes be mixing red and blue multiple times. So on this row I have my read a little bit more dominant. And when I get down to the blue row and I get to the section where I'm mixing blue and red , I'm going to have my blue be more dominant for that row. So again, I'm just working across here, and I am putting my local value in first. So just the mixture, without any black or whites. And then I'm creating a shade for that mixture and then a tent for that mixture. And that really gives me a good sense not only of how these colors interact with each other , but a little bit of a range that I can achieve with these colors and what I'm I expect. And that's especially important four colors that have a very dark local value. And then when I move on to the next row, I just kind of cleaned off a space on my palette so that I wouldn't have to worry about any kind of contamination, and I'm gonna go ahead, and each time I do a row, I will dio the swatch first. That is just the pure color. So this is just where yellow is in her sexing with yellow. So I want to put in a shade and intense here and then I'll move on and I will do my yellow in my red. So this will be the swatch just to the left. And, of course, here I want my yellow to be dominance. You can see how different this orange is from the orange in the red row, where I let the red be a little bit more dominant there. And now I'm going to speed this up quite a bit more so that you can see how I progress through this chart. And as I mentioned, this is a chart that is four by four. And so there's room for four colors. I chose to use my naff all red, my azo yellow ultra marine blue, and then I decided to throw raw number into the mix. So I also I'm getting some really interesting color combinations when I mix, you know, for example, the red with the raw number and the yellow with the raw numbers, so that's very useful information. And then this bottom row here is just for the raw number to be dominant. And so I think that that also creates some really interesting neutral colors. So I'll just show you this up close and you can see we actually get a lot of information out of such a simple chart. And this is just a really great way to document colors. And I really like the idea of maybe gathering a collection of these charts. So I really hope that you'll upload this as a project to this course. Because we'll be able Teoh. See all the different colors that all the students are taking in in experimenting with throughout this class, and they might give you some ideas of colors that you might want. Teoh eventually add to your palate. Or you might be surprised to see the way that too colors interact in ways that you didn't expect. So I hope that you'll share your swatch chart with us so that we can start creating a little bit of a resource for everyone just to kind of see the difference that we all get with different colors. Because, of course we are all going to have a little bit different colors in our pallets that were choosing to use. And it would be really helpful, too, if you labelled with the brand that you used and then the specific colors that you have, just so this gives everybody a little bit of guidance if they want to try something that you have done.
17. Chroma - Exploring "Greys": as I mentioned earlier, we're actually going to spend the majority of this course looking at reduced chroma colors now right off the bat. I want to just say that there are a lot of different words that we use interchangeably to describe these reduced chroma colors. So I'm often guilty of this myself because sometimes it's just a matter of the way that I'm thinking about this. Maybe I want Teoh mute a color, and so then I'm referring to it as a muted color. Maybe I want to neutralize a really intense color, so I call it in neutral. But sometimes we use words like brown or grey, and this can be confusing, because if we look at our color wheel, if we look at the color spectrum, nowhere on there are you really going to find a color brown. So what is brown? Well, basically, brown is any neutralized or reduced chroma color that leans a little bit warmer. So when we tend to think about Brown's, we think of a nice neutral color that has a lot of red or yellow in it, and the definition of a grey is even wider than a brown because of Grey can be warm or cool . So for this project, I want you just to experiment, mixing different greys and then also Brown's. We're going to start out with some grays here, and basically any neutralized color is going to contain at least a little bit of each primary color. So I started off with a blue and a bit of red and just a little bit of yellow. And as I moved throughout this chart, I'm not really being systematic about this at all. I am just shifting this one puddle of recycled color in one direction or the other, so I'm adding more blue. Sometimes I'm adding more yellow sometimes. Sometimes I'm adding more red. But because there are elements of each of these primary colors in this mix, we're going to get a gray. And, you know, we might tend to think of Grey as being that middle gray color. But in truth, when we're talking about mixing paints when we are referring, Teoh colors in art. Ah, lot of times we talk about graying down a color, and so that's just another synonym for neutralizing or muting a color or reducing its chroma. So as long as you have elements of every primary color in the mix that is a gray, you might have a gray that looks like it's almost a fully chromatic red, blue or yellow because our grays or muted colors can lean toward any one of these primary colors, or even toward a secondary color, like green, orange or violets. So this should be a really nice relaxing project for you to work on, because there's no way to get this wrong, and you can also add white. You can add one of your blacks. You can add a neutral or an earthy color in here, Really, you can do anything that you want to dio, and these are all going to be graze. And what I love about this is that these colors, they all harmonize with one another so well. They look beautiful when they're all placed together in context, and beautiful paintings are really just a very harmonious arrangement of neutral colors. Rarely dio we use a fully chromatic color in our painting, and we're going to look a little bit at that later. When we look at some works by some of the great Impressionist masters, some of their paintings look so vibrant and colorful. And yet when we take eyedropper samples from those paintings, it's hard to find a color that really is fully chromatic. They're all muted to some extent. They all have a somewhat reduced chroma. But the way that they interact and relate with one another is what makes the painting really work and come together. And this is how we avoid our paintings. Feeling muddy, we harness the power of reduced chroma colors. We don't fight them. All right, so now let's take a look at browns.
18. Chroma - Exploring "Browns": as we go to paint our swatches of Brown's were also going to come at it with a very relaxed mindset. This is a really nice, interesting, yet relaxed project for you to work on. There's no way to do it wrong now. When we did our gray swatches, as I said, a gray congee, cool or warm. But typically when we say the word brown, it conjures up a mental image of a very warm neutral. So our challenge with this one is just to have a wide array of these reduced chroma colors . But we want them all to lean toward either red or yellow, or even orange or even green. So we're going to have all of these swatches leaning just a little bit on to the warmer side of our color wheel, because this is what we tend to think of as browns. And a good example of brown that I can think of right off the top of my head is when I think about that symbolic picture in our minds of a tree, and as Children, we learn to see a tree as green leaves and a brown trunk. But have you ever looked up close at the trunk of any tree and noticed that it's not really brown at all. It's actually a patina of many, many different colors. It might be a little bit of gray. It might have speckles of a nice, muted yellow. It might have moss on it. It might be green itself. There are so many different colors in a tree that come together. Teoh conjure up that symbol of the word brown and so one of my favorite subjects to paint our trees because I love exploring all those nuanced, warm, neutral colors So you can see here that some of these colors lean a little bit toward read some of them. I might even describes being mahv. Now I'm working on colors that lean a little bit orange or yellow, working my way into the greens as I add just a little bit more blue in here. And remember that every reduced chroma color just has at least some elements of each primary color contained within it and feel free, of course, to increase the value with a little bit of Y. It's to give it a little bit more variety and just have fun with this project, and you can see how these colors vibrate off one another and harmonized with each other in a way that is just so beautiful. So enjoy this little project. Keep it simple and relaxed.
19. Chroma - Green Reduced Chroma Swatch Chart: for this next project. Let's pick one Q from our color wheel and do a deep dive into the different levels of Koroma we can achieve for that color. So I've decided Teoh do Green and Violet, and I'm going to start out with Green. Now I'm going to be using my typical color palette that I used for my color wheel for this side of my swatches. So this is a four by four, and I have this sheet of paper divided into quadrants of four by four. Each of these are one inch square. So I am going to start out with some different colors that I used in my color wheel because I want to see how these other Hughes interact with each other and how they differ from the colors a used on my color wheel. So I'm using a lemon yellow ah permanent rose and then a fellow blue for these 1st 4 by four swatches. So I'm starting out with a full Koroma swatch of a green, and then I'm beginning just too slowly. Add a little bit of red in here and I'm going to be kind of shifting this around, and I'm trying to get as much variation as I can now, even though when we think about decreasing the chroma of a color, we think about adding the compliment. But there's only so much you can do with that. And so you may actually find that you have this reduced chroma green, which we dio on. Then you might find that you add a little bit of blue to it. It may begin to feel like it's shifting a little more closer to blue than Teoh the green, but we started out with a green. And basically the point of this exercise is just to fully explore all of the variations of neutrals that you can get. So sometimes you're going to be adding more yellow to your neutral green, a little bit more blue to your neutral green, and so you'll get colors that begin to feel a little bit more orange, a little bit more blue, a little bit more gray as you proceed through this, and this just gives you an opportunity to dip your toes into the vast world of Kromah and neutral colors because the possibilities truly are endless. And even if some of your colors end up really deviating from your typical standard green, as I'm going to be doing right here. You'll see that, actually, when we look at all of these swatches, we achieve such a beautiful harmony, and that is really intriguing. And this is truly the key to using your neutrals, your muted colors, your reduced chroma colors in a way that does not feel muddy. It feels harmonious, and the colors vibrate off of each other and create vibrance, even though these air all muted colors. Now I know that this one looks almost just like a sky blue, but it does have some red and yellow and blue in it, and so it's technically a muted color. And while it may look blew, it harmonizes very well with the rest of these muted greens. Now I'm moving on to the next quadrant just to the right of my first quadrant. And here is where I'm using my azo yellow, my ultra marine blue and my Nath all red Justus I used in my original color wheel. And I'm trying to mix these in roughly the same manner that I did the first quadrant, and you can see that I'm getting much different results, and that is because the different pigments that we use are going to give us different results with every limited palette that you have, you truly do have an endless opportunity for color variation. But depending on the colors that you choose, you may not be able Teoh achieve the same things that you would with another limited palate . And so that's why I really encourage you to stick with a limited palette of your choosing. It does not need to be any specific set of Hughes or pigments that someone dictates to you . You just need to get to know the properties of the pigments that you are using and learn how to maximize and be very flexible with those colors, because you truly can achieve everything that you want. Teoh. And it's not about replicating very specific colors. It's about color expression, and it's about mastery, and you are going to achieve mastery when you truly know your own pigments. So no matter what you choose to use, embrace it and commit yourself to learning the properties of your specific pigments because it is going to take you so far, and that is what you are going to get out of this class. So again you can see that even though these air all very different colors, some of them feel more yellow or orange, even more violet. They harmonize so well with each other. And yet there's so much variation. And some of these colors really stand out against all of the other ones, and that is exactly what we want to be able to achieve in our paintings. So embrace the limited palate and explore it.
20. Chroma - Violet Reduced Chroma Swatch Chart: and now I'm going to just very quickly demonstrate that same project for you. But this time, instead of green, I'm going to do violets. And again on the four by four quadrant to the left, I'm going to be using permanent Rose fellow blue and a cadmium lemon yellow. And again, the purpose of doing this is multi faceted. First of all, I want you to be able to explore ah wider range of reduced chroma colors that you can achieve when we did the color wheel. We only had enough room to do three swatches of reduced chroma colors for each of the primary secondary and tertiary colors on our color wheel. So this is going to allow you just to pick a color any color and explore it a little bit more in depth. And another purpose of this project is to begin to get to know your particular pigments. So with every limited palate, you're going to have some colors that are a little bit weaker and some colors that are much stronger for this first batch where I have my fellow blew. My fellow blue is very powerful. Just a little bit of it goes a long ways, and my permanent rose is relatively weak in comparison. So you can see that, actually, for these first swatches, even though this is supposed to be violet, these air leaning very much closer to the blue Range because I let my fellow blue kind of overpower my permanent rose. And of course, I'm adding in just a little bit of yellow into each mix. Just Teoh. Help neutralize each of these colors and bring that chroma down a little bit. So with violence, we can shift between it leaning more toward blue or more toward the red. But it's all violet, and now I'm going to go ahead and clean up my palate. And this time I'm using my ultra marine blue, my naff all red and then my azo yellow, just like I used on my sample of the color wheel. And so you're gonna be able to see that the violets that I get with these pigments are just a little bit different. I find that mixing violet with this combination of ultra marine blue NAFTA. Allred gives me a little bit more of a muted violet just by default, even without adding any yellow in its more of a muted violet than I otherwise get. And that is because the national red leans a little bit closer to orange on the spectrum rather than toward violence. We don't get a strong of a violet. And as you get to know your particular pigments of choice, that is one of the things that you'll begin to notice. You might be using a combination of pigments where you go to mix a really vibrant orange, and you just feel like you can't quite get there. Well, it may just have to do with the particular pigments that you are using. And so there's always going to be tradeoffs when using a limited palate. However, if you can look past those limitations and see that you still can create a vibrant orange by surrounding it by muted versions of its complement, which, of course, is blue that that orange will look very vibrance and brights and chromatic in comparison with the neutralised blues and perhaps violets that you have surrounded it with. So let's embrace neutrals and let's embrace the limited palettes because color is more about relationships than it is about replicating very specific colors. So take your time with this project. Explore, Enjoy. Be very loose and casual with it. And I think you're going to be happy with what you get in the end.
21. Chroma - Creating Skin Tones: a common challenge for new painters is the prospect of painting skin. Maybe you want to pay a portrait or a figurative subject, and you're baffled as to how you paint skin. Maybe you've even bought a tube of paint that was called flesh tint or something like that , and you squeeze it out. And it was this kind of light pink strange color, and I don't know about you, but I've never seen anyone who is the color of flesh tints. So in this video, let's go ahead and begin to explore the beautiful world of skin tones. And this is just going to be a small sample of skin tones. The thing that I love about painting people is that our skin actually contains every conceivable color, so it doesn't matter what color palette you happen to be using. You can mix flesh tones, and I am going to show you how so. I know it might be hard to read my little chart here, but basically I want to paint four different skin tones, a light, a medium, a medium dark and dark skin tones and through a couple of different values. So I'm going to start with a lighter value have labeled it Ah, highlight, but this really won't be highlight values. I'll add that a little bit later, and then there's going to be a mid tone, which will be a little bit darker. And then what I've labeled blush basically just means any portion of the skin that has a lot of blood capital Aries. And so it might appear a little bit more red and then last. I have a couple of squares reserved for shadows, so I'm going to start over on the left hand side and work my way across. I'm going to start with the light skin tones, and one thing that I tend to notice about lighter skin tones is that they lean a little bit more pink or red. So as I mix this, there's going to be a little bit more of a balance toward the red side. And as a move over to the darker skin tones, they're going to balance a little bit closer to other colors, so the medium and medium dark skin tones will tend Teoh balance a little bit warmer, and then when we get to our darkest skin tone, there will be a little bit more blue in it, but these all have every single primary color contained within them. And the difference in the values is not just about adding white, of course, for the darkest shadow skin tone. I had to actually add a lot of yellow and blue to this. We're not using any black here. Of course, we're going to keep these colors very rich and highly chromatic. So now let's move over to our medium skin tones. And essentially, I'm adding some yellow because I really want to warm up the temperature. Of course, I have to add some blue. Now, if you think about it, a skin tone could never be just two colors because we would be mixing an orange or violet or a green. So that's why I say that skin tones, every single skin tone has every single conceivable color within it. The balance might be a little bit different. It may lean toward warm or cool, and the amount of white that we need to mix into it will vary just a little bit, depending on the skin tone. And even though I've labeled this chart as being pertinent to light skin tones. Medium, medium dark, dark skin tones, etcetera. Once we get finished with this whole entire chart, I think that you'll pretty easily see that it would be conceivable to use every single color on this chart to paint one single portrait. Because our skin is very complex, it's not like it's just a sheet placed on us. Our skin varies in its thickness, at varies on, how much blood it's getting to it and other factors. And so we're always going to be using ah, lot of nuance when mixing flesh tones. It's not as though if I were to paint a portrait that all I would have to dio was mix four different colors to be able to pay an entire portrait. I mean, I could do that because essentially, as long as the values air somewhat correct, the form is going toe look correct. But if I really want to capture the color of someone's face or body, I'm going to need a very wide range of thes lovely neutral colors. And so you could even dio chart that is much bigger with many, many more squares. In order to truly capture the full range of colors that you might use in a portrait or a figurative piece of work. And while this small chart includes skin tones that are mostly warm in temperature, it's important to know that you may have skin tones in some parts of the body, especially in shadows that could even lean really toward blue. And if you are doing a portrait or a figurative piece of work and there's an object reflecting off that person's skin, you might be painting a whole host of colors to do that portrait. All right, so let's take a look at what we've got here. You can see I added just a little dot of white Teoh some of the lighter values just to really show what ah highlight might actually look like. And you can see that these colors, they are just rich and they're beautiful and I love painting. Skin tones is so fun and interesting
22. Value - Shade - What is Dark Yellow?: really quick before we get into the value portion of the color wheel. There's a few things that I want to cover, actually, just two things. And that's the fact that when we decrease the value by shading a color or increase the value by tensing a color, we are changing the color that we are mixing. And this is something that I hear people become frustrated about, especially when it pertains to a color like yellow. You may have experienced trying Teoh dark in a yellow, and what you end up getting is a green, especially if you use a black or a chromatic black to decrease that value. Yellow is kind of a unique color because we tend to only recognize a yellow as being a yellow when is at its local value or lighter. So, basically, any time we begin, Teoh take the value of yellow down. We stopped recognizing it as a yellow. It might become more of an orange if we're darkening it with something that is a little closer to read or a green. If we're using something that's a little bit closer, Teoh Blue or we might say that it's a brown if we're using a violet Teoh, decrease the value. But it's important to know that with any color, not just yellow. By darkening the value or lightning the value we are changing its inherent properties. This effect is just a little bit more obvious with a color like yellow, which is why I'm using it to demonstrates. But remember, even a black straight out of the tube is still a pigment, and a lot of times a black in the tube, a pre made black is just going to be a very dark violet or a blue violin. So, of course, when we mix that with yellow, we're going to get a green, and this can actually be a really powerful thing to know. I know that I've mentioned in previous courses a particular limited palette that is referred to as the Zorn pallets, and with this palette, it consists of no blue. Instead of a blue, it uses ivory black, and when you mix that ivory black with yellow, just as I'm doing right here, we actually get a lot of greens, and that could be amazing to know that you can have a complete palette without any blue at all. So use this knowledge to your advantage and get comfortable with the fact that when you are changing the value of a color, you are changing that color itself over on this side. I'm just using my chromatic black Teoh dark in the value of this yellow, and you're going to see that much to the same effect. We get very similar hues of green with this chromatic black. For the sake of our color wheel, we will just stick to the typical black or chromatic black to decrease the values of all of our Hughes. But just keep in mind that that is not by any means the only way to change the value of your hue. Just as an example. A little bit later, in this course, I'm going to be demonstrating how Teoh mix your colors in two different ways, and I'll be demonstrating this by painting two different compositions of the same lemon. And of course, you know that the local color of most if not all lemons is, ah, yellow. And if I was painting that yellow and looking at the dark side of that form, thinking that in order to decrease the value of that color. I need to add a black. I'm going to end up with kind of a green side to the lemon, and sometimes that is appropriate. However, in the composition that I'll be using, I noticed that the darker side of the lemon is actually a little bit more orange. So to decrease the value off that yellow lemon, I actually needed to add red to it. Of course, it's going to be more of a muted red, but it certainly wouldn't look right if I had used a black because the color temperature would have been completely off for that shadow area. All right, so let's take a look here at what we've got. Yellow plus black, ivory, black on the left and my chromatic black on the right. And we can see if I can get my camera straight here that these colors are actually pretty similar to each other. So whether you choose to use Ah, black out of the tube or make your own black, just know that you are, of course, changing the color in addition to changing the value and let's do the same thing with tents
23. Value - Tint - What is Light Red?: All right, so now I just want to take a few short minutes to demonstrate this effect that applies also to tense. So, of course, we now know that when we decrease the value of a color with anything, whether it's black or just another color with a different local value, we are changing that initial color. So I'm going to demonstrate the same thing on the tent side, and I'm just gonna use two different reds just for the sake of comparison. So I have my NAFTA all red over on the left, and then I'm using a permanent rose on the right. Well, we can see right off the bat that these two reds are very different now. You could use either one of these for your primary color. It doesn't matter. They're going to interact with your other colors in slightly different ways that you may prefer or maybe don't want. So that's a good thing to learn and to know. But we also need to know that when we increase the value of any color, we are changing its color, and I think that with tints, this is a little bit harder to understand that it was with shades, especially when we look at shading a color like yellow, and how dramatically it changes the Hugh well when we add white, which, of course, all of your whites are pigments. We are also changing the colors, and this is a really important thing to know because just like how you may not want Teoh darken your lemon by using a black and getting a green shade side of that form, you may not want to paint the light side of the form of, say, a red apple by merely adding white to read, because you're going to make it look chalky and a little bit lifeless. Sometimes it's just going to be more appropriate to look for other options to increase the value of your color, because we just need to be aware that we're always changing the color when we change the value. So we just need to be more mindful of what direction we want to change that color. So as we can see here already, we've taken a red and we've added white to it, and the result is that we have various shades of peak now and you know Peak isn't super different from red. But it is difference in a lot of ways, and the ways that we might apply this to a painting are going to depend on our intention. So maybe you are painting a very soft, delicate flower, and so it may be appropriate to add a lot of white in order to increase the value of a pink flower. Now, a lot of times, even if I am adding white, and I want Teoh paint something that I perceive as being pink as I add more white, I usually will also add a little bit of yellow just to avoid that chalky feeling, adding a little bit of yellow. Yes, it changes the color, but it also helps that color remain full of life and vibrance.
24. Mood, Energy, and Color Schemes: so far in this course, we've spent most of our time talking about the more inherent properties of color, such as Hue, Kromah and Value. And I did say that we weren't going to talk about temperature because that is a subjective feature of color. But we are going to talk about color in a subjective way in this course, because it is important we're going to move beyond the rigors of color theory and into a little bit of color psychology, and I'm sure that this is not completely foreign to you. But as humans, we tend to associate different moods or energies with different colors. So here are just a few very simple examples of some of the associations we have for some common colors. So with red, sometimes we see passion or danger with violent. Maybe we see creativity or a fantasy world white. We might associate with innocence or clarity with green, maybe wealth or growth. So let's take a look at some of the works by some of my favorite Impressionist masters and see what kind of feelings they evoke. Now we'll talk about each of these paintings and analyze them in more detail in just a little bit. But for now, let's just appreciate the beauty. I don't want to project my own feelings and emotions about these pieces onto you, but just take a second. Teoh reflect on how thes paintings make you feel. All right, so let's take a closer look at some of these with this painting by Claude Monet called In the Meadow. I see a lot of warmth, and we get that from all of the greens and the yellows, and that's complemented by the warm pink tones of the woman's face. And in the context of all of those greens and yellows, the pink on her face becomes a very strong focal point for this composition, and we can see that this uses a color scheme that we would describe as a split, complementary color scheme with a strong accent. And just to the right of the painting. You can see that I've used my eye dropper in Photoshopped to take a few samples from some of the most vibrant portions of this painting. But you can see that even the most vibrant portions of this painting are not fully chromatic, especially if we compare those watches with this simple color wheel over to the right. So this is a great example of how the masters used muted colors in relation to one another to create the illusion of vibrance without using fully chromatic colors. Here we have an analogous color scheme. Again, this feels very warm and sunny, and this is probably just a common theme, especially with Impressionist painting, because many of them depict casual outdoor scenes of leisure. And so we tend to associate the subjects and the colors with positive feelings. And again, even though this painting feels very colorful and vibrant, weaken, see that even the most vibrant color samples that I took from this painting are muted when we compare them to the fully chromatic colors in that color wheel. Now here comes one of my favorite paintings. I absolutely love this. This is really a complementary color scheme because even though we'd may not have a fully chromatic red in here, we have a lot of greens complemented by that beautiful, orangish red sky, and again notice how colorful it feels, even though those samples that I took from the painting are very muted. But in relation to one another, they create color vibrations, and that helps us to feel like this painting is very vibrant. And here is a triad IQ color scheme where we can see elements of every primary color. Within this composition, we can see a lot of yellows, a little bit of reds, especially in the boats and on the trees and some blues. But again, these are all very muted when compared to that color wheel. And yet this painting, it feels so full of life. It is so vibrant and inviting. And this is the power of our reduced chroma colors and using them in relationship to each other, not to create muddy paintings but to create nuanced and interesting paintings that vibrates . Now here is an example that I found that felt slightly less warm and happy. It's a little bit more moody. We have a very strong and large dark subject in this painting, and we have just some of the more vibrant, saturated colors peeking through. This is an example of a split, complementary color scheme where we have lots of greens going on, even though they're a small portion, and then we have one red focal points on the dress of the subjects. The yellow in this composition is actually quite chromatic, especially compared to some of the other paintings that we just took a look at. But it is muted somewhat by that dark figure, so it's not overpowering and overwhelming and overstimulating in this painting. And in my personal opinion, according to my own tastes, paintings that contain a lot of fully chromatic colors feel a little bit over stimulating to me. And so I really like and appreciate this balance where the artist has found a way to use a highly chromatic color in a way that isn't overwhelming. So I think a good take away is that even if you want to create paintings that are energetic , vibrant and full of life and positive emotions for your viewers, it doesn't mean that you need to use highly chromatic colors. You just need to use your reduced chroma colors in a wise way
25. Designing a Color Scheme: for this project, we are going to use our muted or reduced chroma colors in a way that is orderly and wise, and we're also going to incorporate a color scheme. So I'm choosing to do a split, complementary color scheme with a strong accent. I'm going Teoh, compliment all of these muted dark violets with a nice yellow, and I'm going to do this in a very abstract way. So I am not going to be painting a landscape or portrait or still life or anything like that. I'm actually going to just be painting another set of swatches, but I'm going to organize them a little bit more than I've done previously. So it doesn't matter how Maney swatches you give yourself for this exercise. I think that I'm doing five by five because that's relatively simple, but you could make your squares smaller so that you have more opportunities. Teoh. Combine your colors or you could even do less. But the important thing here is that I'm going to be using a very limited palate, and I'm going to organize this in a very particular way. So recall that the color scheme that I'm using doesn't really include any red or blue. It's all going to be violets and blue violets and red violets. So what I'm doing first is I'm going ahead, and I added a little bit of red to my blue and a little bit of blue to my red. So now I no longer have any fully chromatic blues or reds on my palettes. And as I proceed, what I'm going to do is pre mix my colors with the mixing method of color strings. So I'm basically just going to work on mixing my colors and a logical way where they gradually shift and become other colors, specifically more muted or reduced chroma colors. And remember, I'm going to be using yellow as the focal points of this piece. So this piece is going to be predominantly these violets, blue violets and red violets, and I'm going to neutralize these by adding a little bit of yellow to the mix is I'm going to vary the values just a little bit. But I really want to keep my values relatively dark for this composition. And it's important to know, too, that when you're pre mixing colors and making color strings, it doesn't mean that you are obligated to use every single color that you mix, and it doesn't mean that you won't do any mixing on the fly if you find that there's a color that you particularly need, so here you can see I've not only added white Teoh this red violet, but I also added a little bit of yellow to reduce that chroma. And as I go along, I'm adding yellow, especially if I add white to the mix. I'm always going to add a little bit of yellow because again, as I said earlier in this course, if you only add white toe light in the value, you can tend to end up with colors that look a little bit chalky. So one way that I handled this is I often will add a little bit of yellow if I'm adding white just to keep that color nice and lively, and I'm not being specific at all about the precise colors that I'm mixing. I just want a good variety and I put my yellow over here on the other side of my palate just so I could make sure to keep it a little bit more separate from these other colors, but you can see I've added a little bit of a violet in with that yellow. And in this painting, even though yellow is going to be my focal point, and it's going to appear as kind of an accent or a focal point in this piece, I'm never going to use a fully chromatic yellow in here. Now I'm adding even more violent to this yellow and even more violets. I'm going to do all of my mixing, and at this point in the process, I really have no concept of a particular subject that I'm painting or an objective other than just to incorporate this color scheme in a very pleasing color composition. So I'm going to speed this up just a little bit more as I apply these mixtures to my swatches, honestly, really not even thinking about how these air going except that I know that I want all of my darker values up at the top, and maybe there will be some values down at the bottom that are just a little bit slightly lighter in value. But really there won't be any portion of this composition that have a high value. This is a very low key composition because all of the values are going to be at the lower half of that color scale or that value scale. So right here I'm slowing it down just a little bit because I want you to notice that here I am using a very muted yellow. Now, I don't think that you would look at this color and call it yellow, per se. But in the context of all of these really dark violets, it is lighter in value. And it definitely appears different than the violets, Not in a harsh contrast. E way it's not clashing is going toe work with this composition. But this is going to be where my focal point ends up being in this composition. So now I'm gonna go ahead and continue surrounding it with more muted colors that have varying levels of violet and yellow in them. And all that I really care about is having plenty of variation in nuance in here without the colors clashing with one another. So I want them all to be very harmonious. Now you can see I'm applying colors that even lean a little bit closer to green. And pretty soon there's gonna be some colors in here that lean a little bit more red or orange again. No particular objective in mind here, other than to have lots of variety and yet a harmonious color composition. And I want to keep everything for the most part in that range of violets and yellows. But if you recall, sometimes when you're mixing a muted violet and you have a lot of blue in it and a lot of yellow in it, it's gonna be green. But it still works for the overall composition because it's muted, all right, so I'm finishing up all of these larger squares, and now I'm going. Teoh, bring this composition toe life quite a lot more. So right now these squares were just kind of roughly painted. I did this all within just a few minutes. There's a lot of white of my paper showing through that bothers me a little bit, but I'm not going to be too nit picky about this project. Of course, this is just a way to explore color composition, but basically I'm just taking my brush here and kind of merging some of these edges together so that we get a little bit more of a soft look. We're still going to have a strong grid present here, but I feel like just merging some of these colors together a little bit makes it a little bit easier on the eye. All right, so this is where I am going into some of my muted yellows that I've mixed up, and this is where the magic happens first. Before we do that, let's just take a close look. I know there's a lot of glare from all this wet oil paint, but hopefully you can see some of these very subtle, nuanced colors that shift around this composition. If I lean it, maybe you can see some spots that have glare and some others that aren't so glory. So that tends to happen. If you're using a lot of dark values, you will struggle a little bit more with glare from your studio lights. All right, so I'm taking some of this muted yellow. This is a very muted yellow, and I just applied a little bit on there. I didn't cover up that entire square, and now I'm going to go in with my least muted yellow. So this is the yellow that I have that is closest to being very chromatic. But it still is muted and just placing a little bit there and look at how that glows against all of those dark violets. It looks so vibrance, and we're going to take it even just a little bit further. We're gonna add just a little bit of white. So I'm mixing some white into that reduced chroma yellow, and we'll just out a little dot right there and look at that. It just looks like it glows, even though it's such a small piece of this whole composition, and it's not even a fully chromatic color, and yet it looks like it's glowing. I don't know. Maybe it's a street light. Maybe it's the moon. I don't know. This is just an abstract composition, but essentially, this is what those masters of Impressionism were going for. They're using reduced chroma colors and yet still getting a vibrant, interesting and harmonious color composition. And this is what we want to strive for in using color. It's not about replicating, color, copying, color being able. Teoh mix any particular color on demand. It's really about the relationships between the colors that you're using and the wise application of them. So I hope that you enjoy this little exercise. You should try some of the other color schemes that you're intrigued by, Keep it abstract and keep it fun.
26. Color Mixing Strategy: Color Strings: in this video, I'm going to show you a strategy for mixing your colors. This is called mixing color strings, and I think that this is a really powerful strategy, especially for beginner painters. And to be quite honest with you, I wasn't even aware of this mixing technique until fairly recently, and I've tried it a few times, and it really is amazing. I honestly think that I'll probably start painting like this more often now. It involves a lot of pre mixing, and that can feel a little bit tedious at first. But what I've realized is that it really pays off, because then when I actually get to start painting, it really starts to flow for me. And I don't have to take breaks from applying paint. Teoh sittin, analyze and try to figure out what color I need. Teoh create next. So for this technique and for the next technique, which will be using recycled color, I'm going to be painting the same lemon. Now I've drawn this a little bit differently than the photo reference shows it. You can see that photo reference up in the upper right hand corner, and so I wanted it to be more of your standard lemon shape. That photograph has a very round lemon, so I changed that a little bit, took a little bit of artistic liberty. So what I'm doing here is I started out with just my three primaries. So my azo yellow, my NAFTA read my ultra marine blue, and I initially began with two piles of my yellow paint. And that's just because I know that I need a lot of green. So one of those yellow piles of paint, the one that's right next to my blue that's reserved for mixing greens. And right away here, I'm going to go ahead and start mixing some secondary colors. So it mixed and orange between my red and my yellow and a violet between my blue and my red . And now I'm going to mix a nice blue green here between my blue and that yellow, and then the other yellow pile down at the bottom of my palette that will be more of a yellow green. And so then, once I have all of my secondary colors mixed, I'm going to begin dividing these piles into smaller piles, where I will begin to change things such as the chroma and the value, and I'm adding just a little bit of red here, Teoh. My first string. I'm going to start down here at the bottom with this yellow green, and every time I mix up a pile and I finish mixing it, I used my palette knife to divide that pile and start a new one. And as I look at my photo reference to complete my color strings, it's not really a matter of trying to exactly copy or replicate the colors I'm observing in the photograph. It's really important to keep in mind that the colors that we see in a photograph don't mean a lot. They're kind of a starting point for me, but I know that if I tried to copy the colors from the photograph, my painting isn't going to be very vibrant or interesting looking. So it's really important, not Teoh. Be too tied to the colors that you're observing in the photograph, and as long as you're mixing these color strings and altering them as you go, you're going to get ah, lot of really great and interesting colors that will work for your composition. So if you look back at the yellow green string. I went ahead and added some more yellow to that. And then the pile at the very end of that string has a little bit of red in it. So it's kind of a warm, muted, orangish green. And I love that, especially when I'm painting leaves. I find that that's a really effective way to give life to these leaves. And remember, too, that there are more ways than one Teoh change the value of a color. So for that yellow green, I was able to deepen the value just a little bit by adding a touch of red to that mix. And so it changed the value, and it also changed the color. If I were to just add a black or just had a white to it, it may not feel quite as lively. I only need a few blues, and most of the blues that I'm seeing in my composition are very light and value their basically just the sky peeking through in the background, and you might think that this would be one instance wearing just having blue. But no, I actually will be mixing in a little bit of orange, barely any to be perceptible. But what is going to do is it's just going to push that color into the distance so that its not clashing or distracting. This is one way Teoh increase the feeling of harmony between your colors. If you have a lot of warm colors in your composition and then just one really cool color, they might end up kind of clashing with one another in a way that you may not prefer. And so adding, just a touch of a warm color into your cool color can kind of neutralize it, quiet it down a little bit and push it into the distance so you can see that with my blues . I really don't need a dark value because they don't have any dark blues in this composition . I have a lot of dark greens, and so those will be more of my blue greens, which I also will add just a little bit of red into. I know that I'm gonna be using a lot of yellow in this composition. So I went ahead and gave myself a little bit more, and now I'm beginning. Teoh, shift this violet and I don't really see any opportunities for, you know, really strong violets in this composition. And so I'm adding a lot of yellow to my violets to really mute them. Maybe I'll have a few areas where I can use kind of a red violet that's very muted, and I do see that some of the branches and twigs in the distance those are a little bit warmer, and that's a really good opportunity. I think Teoh add some nice, warm colors in a way that's very subtle and fits very well with the composition, and it won't be overwhelming, all right. So as I move on here, I am observing the form of the lemon. Of course, this is kind of my focal point here, and as I stated earlier to adjust the value of a color, it's not always appropriate to add either black or white. And if I were to add a black to the yellows and oranges that I see in this lemon, it would turn those parts of the lemon a little bit toward green, and I don't necessarily want that I have enough green in this composition. First of all and second of all it just when it looked natural for this particular subject and the way that it's being lit by the sun, the shadow area is actually very warm. And so it's going to be way more appropriate to use a muted oranges for the shadow side of this lemon, and that will also decrease the value a little bit. Of course, yes, it does change the color, and so that part of the lemon and actually the majority of the lemon. I will not be painting with colors that we would interpret as being yellow, but it's still going to look like a lemon because it all kind of comes together in that highlight area on the light side of the form. And I don't actually need to use a lot of white in this composition. I had Teoh use a lot of my white to mix the blues for the sky because, of course I only needed a small quantity of my ultra marine blue and so that I needed a lot of white in order to get the value that I wanted. But otherwise there's actually not a lot of need for whites in this composition because the highlight area is yellow and yellow is already a very light value. So over here on the side, I'm just gonna go ahead and mix a yellow color string with just a few different value shifts, and I'm not even sure that I'll necessarily need the lightest one here. And I will need to actually mute these a little bit, too. So I will probably use just a little bit of one of my violet mixtures. Just Teoh. Add a touch of neutrality to those bright yellows, just dipping into that violet and adding it over here to this yellow. And once I get everything mixed, I'm going to speed up the painting process quite a bit more. It really didn't take too much time to begin with, because it's really just a matter of working through the composition. And the way that I work through a painting is that I always start with my darkest values. It doesn't matter which color happens to be my darkest value. Of course, it's usually a blue or green or violet that ends up being in those value ranges, but that's where we start, and I gradually begin to build up from my darkest value to my lightest values. And so all I really have to do is judge my colors based on their relative Hugh that belongs in certain parts of the composition and their value. And the Koroma part is already taking care of for me. So this is a really nice organized way. Teoh. Address a painting and to really be able to focus on your color technique rather than constantly having to stop your process to try to discern what you need to mix, get next and then perhaps shifting your color a little bit too far in the wrong direction. And then that pile becomes difficult to deal with and difficult to change. So I really do like this method, and I think that it just frees you up. Teoh Not be constantly trying Teoh mimic colors, especially if you're working from a photo reference and you feel like you have a lot of time to kind of fiddle around with things, and you never quite know if it's right, and so you kind of fiddle with it too much, and by the time you're done mixing, it just isn't right. So I think that this is a great way to go ahead. Do all of your mixing before you will put any paint to your canvas. And then from there, all you have to think about is value and Hugh and you should already have a range of different chromosomes to work into your composition so that you don't have to worry about where those fit and because when we mix a color string, we do it in a very logical fashion. Then it's all going to come together to work and be very harmonious and to make sense for your composition. So it takes just a lot of the anxiety out of the process. So I strongly encourage you to give this mixing strategy a try. I think that you're going toe like it again. Don't try to mix colors that match what you're seeing in the photograph. Just start with a pile of a given Hugh and adjust the Value range and adjust the Koroma range, and you are going to have a really interesting mix of nuanced color
27. Color Mixing Strategy: Recycled Color: And now, just to contrast a little bit with the mixing strategy of mixing color strings, I'm gonna go ahead and use a strategy or a technique or a process, I guess I'm not sure that I would necessarily call this a technique because it's not very technical, but basically this is called using recycled color. And if you've seen my other videos, this is what you have seen me do. For the most part, this is just how I naturally paint and how I've observed some other people painting as well . And basically, what this is is that I start with out mixing any of my colors together. Now I do still have two yellows on my pellet. One is reserved for mixing greens, and the other one, I can use more for yellows and oranges without contaminating it with a lot of blue. I'm starting with my darkest value here, which has, of course, a lot of blue in it. And as I go, I'm just grabbing colors from my primary colors and just adding them into this mixture. And so what I'm doing here is I'm just gradually shifting this pile around Teoh fit whatever I need at the moment. So I always start, of course, with my darkest values, and I try to wait as long as I can before I even touch any white. And at some point, like right now when I needed to shift really strongly towards yellow, I went ahead and I used some of that existing mixture in the middle of my palate. But I didn't use all of it because I knew that it would actually overpower the yellow that I needed to add. And I really needed a good shift toward yellow at this point. So basically, as I am using this mixture, I'm just shifting it toward whatever direction I need. And for me, I think about color primarily in terms of value and chroma and temperature. And using a recycled mixing technique means that I don't really have to worry about mixing different chromosomes because everything that I mix in here is going to be a reduced chroma or a neutral color. I can shift it toward one Hugh or another just by adding more of that color in. And if I feel like I need it to be a little bit warmer and temperature, all I do is I add some yellow or some red If I need to cool it, I add some blue, of course. And then if I really need to make a drastic shift like I did just right here so I can paint in the sky, I'll start a whole new pile. And one other important thing to know about this is that I don't wash my brush out at all. When I do this, I might wipe it off on a paper towel if I have a lot of excess paint on it. But I'm not even opening up my container of solvent to do this, because I want to always have very nuanced colors in this mixture. And so there's no need for me to have a perfectly clean paintbrush. And rather than having everything premixed on my palette and then being able just to focus on my painting, I'm having to pause from applying paint to my substrate and having Teoh move onto the next mixture. And so I think that this process can feel a little bit disruptive because you're constantly having to re evaluate your color. But in general, if you take out the fact that I'm having Teoh pause in order to remix the next color. I'm really proceeding around the composition in roughly the same way. So I started out with my darkest values, which, of course, are in those dark greens And as they move into the lemon, I started with the shadow side of the lemon, and I waited as long as I could before I added any white into the mix. Just because once you add right into a mix and quite honestly, once you have white in the bristles of your paintbrush, it will contaminate your colors in a way that will make it very difficult. If you do need to add another very dark value, Teoh actually get it very dark. And once you have white in your bristles to, it's going Teoh, do something that I like to call chock. If eyeing it will make everything that you mix look just a little bit more chalky than it would otherwise if you didn't have any white in your bristles. And then there's also the fact that it's much easier with oil paints to paint from dark to light. So if I need to add a lighter value on top of a darker value. I can easily do that. But if I need to add a dark value over a light value and the paint is very wet and it's very thick because that's how I paint, it's going to just merge together, and that white underneath will just basically cancel out that darker value in my experience . So I do proceed around the painting in roughly the same way. It's just that the mixing is a little bit different, and I do get a different result. You condemn finitely. See here that there's a big difference between these two compositions, even though I'm using the exact same photo reference, the exact same colors. So I think that there is something to be said about these two methods, and it's going to come down to your personal preference. If you're someone who really likes to be organized and know what you're doing, you like to have a game plan. I think that using the color strings is a really great strategy, and I actually personally enjoy it myself, even though I have a little bit of a personal resistance to being overly orderly and planned when I don't have to be, but it does make for a nice composition. Now, of course, the recycled mix does, too. And so I think that it's just going Teoh for me, come down to what my priority is during that painting session. So let's take a closer look at both of these, and you can see there definitely different. Even my brush strokes look different, I think, because I was more rushed doing the recycled mix. But I think they're both pretty interesting and effective, so I encourage you to experiment and see what you prefer for your own color strategy.
28. Optical Mixing vs. Direct Mixing: mixing colors isn't always just about mixing your colors on the palette and then applying them. You can actually do ah lot of mixing directly on your painting, and that's what we're going to explore in this video. So what I'm going to Dio is I'm going to draw three circles and I'm just going to grab a little cup that I have laying around. And what I want to dio is create three circles that all intersect with each other. We've all kind of seen this kind of like a little Venn diagram, but with three circles instead of just two, and I'm going to show you three different ways. Teoh mix your colors and two of these I call creating color vibrations, and one of them will just be kind of our control study where we mix the colors on the palette and then we apply them to the surface. So what I'm going to be doing is showing you up in the upper left hand corner. This is going to be an experiment in glazing, so we're going Teoh be mixing colors, not directly. We're not going to be mixing the colors physically with one another. We're going to be mixing them indirectly and any time that we're doing glazing. That means that we are applying transparent paint on top of a dry layer. So for this particular section, it's actually going to take me a couple of days to do that. But don't worry. I've got it all in one video, and it's a really cool process that is definitely worth it. But you do have to let the lower layer dry before you can glaze on top of it. But what we're going to get there is a mixture of colors, a combining of the colors that is optical, so it's kind of an optical mix rather than a direct mix. And if you ever hear anyone refer to indirect painting, this is what that term refers to because you are mixing colors in directly. So I'm going to start out here applying my yellows throughout this entire chart. So I'm gonna put this yellow up here well, where I will be doing the glazing. But that's all I'm going to be doing up here for now, because I need to let this dry and then I'll come back tomorrow to glaze over it and I am using my walnut al kid medium, and that does help the drying process to speed up very, very much. So I know that when I get up tomorrow in the morning, this will be dry enough for me to glaze over it. So this is where we're going to show glazing and right here is where we're going to do direct mixing. So for all of these intersecting areas, I'm actually going to mix those colors on my palette and then apply them. And then here I'm doing another optical blend. And this is a technique that's often used in Impressionist painting, where we use small dabs of paint. Teoh not necessarily mixed together evenly, but to allow paint to show through, and it's a little bit more of an uneven mixed. But from a distance it creates a really nice effect. So here we are, back on the direct mixing Triad is what I will call it. It's a triad of circles that intersect, and our goal here is to have these intersect and then in the middle. We want to try to get to black because, of course, we're using subtracted color. So when they combine they reduce down to black. So right here I don't want Teoh. Go in right away and start mixing the color. But you can see now I'm doing a little bit of stippling onto the yellow where the magenta and yellow intersect. And by the way, the limited palette that I am using in this video is my magenta, my cadmium lemon, and then my fellow turquoise. I'm gonna do my fellow turquoise last just because it is such a strong color and difficult to clean out of your brush so you can see here. I'm kind of creating the optical illusion oven orange, even though I am just stippling the magenta on top of that wet yellow paint. And it's not a very strong orange. It's very subtle. It's very soft. And so if that's the effect that you happen, Teoh want. This is a good technique. And of course, Stippling isn't the only way Teoh achieve that. But this is just the technique that I'm showing you here for that kind of optical blending . So I'm gonna go in and put my fellow turquoise. I think I might have put too much medium in there if you are painting and you have too much medium and you can tell that your pain is just way too liquidy. What you can dio is dab your brush off on a paper towel without applying more painter medium to it and then go back in and just kind of pick up some of that excess liquid. All right, so we're gonna finish up this optical blend the Impressionist optical blend here. I've applied my fellow turquoise and now I'm going to start stippling that fellow turquoise over my magenta. Wear it in intersex so you can see that we get a really nice soft violet here, and then I'll do the same thing. Get a little bit more of that turquoise and in the middle. So here I'm definitely not going to be able to achieve a nice black. It's really going to be more of a neutral, and I'll probably go back in over this with a little bit more. Magenta. Magenta is just a lot weaker than my fellows. Her coy's. Any time that you have a pigment with the words they low in it, you can just no right off the bat that it's going to be a very powerful pigments. A low is actually and artificial pigment. So it's not something that you find in nature, and what's interesting is that it's a relatively new pigment. So a lot of artists in the past did not have access to this. But again, it's very strong and it's very overpowering. So any time that you're using it, you should use it in small quantities. So I'm gonna go ahead back in here to the center and just try to get a nice, neutral color. It doesn't need to be black, but you can certainly see that it's darker and much more neutral than every other area of this circle triad. So now let's go ahead and finish up the direct mixing, and we're just going Teoh do that just to compare it to the other methods. So I'm going back to my yellow here and at first will mix up my orange time adding some magenta to the yellow, and you can see that this yellow is just much more powerful than the magenta. So it's not a really bright orange, which is a little bit surprising to me because I would think that a magenta and a cadmium lemon would combine to create a really vivid orange. But again, this is why we should experiment with limited palettes because we might just make those assumptions and not fully understand what's going on. So I think that what is going on here is just that my magenta is very weak, and it's also extremely transparent. It's much more transparent than that cadmium lemon. So the cadmium lemon is kind of taking over, and the best I could get was kind of a yellowish orange color Sonam combining my magenta with that halo turquoise to get a violet, and this is actually a really nice, vibrant, violent. And so if I were to desire having a really nice violet, then I might think about using these colors to create that. The next thing, of course, that I'm going to do is to mix up a green between the yellow and that halo turquoise, and you can see this makes a really bright green. This is a green that I'm not even sure you would necessarily find in nature. Even the brightest green leaf I'm not sure would be quite this bright, but we're going to go ahead and place it between the yellow and the red. And now we're just combining all of these colors in varying amounts just to the point where we're getting a really nice black. And I didn't use any white for any of these mixtures, so I don't have to worry about white contaminating this mixture, and we're just place this in the middle. But you can see that this gives us a pretty decent black, especially when we compare it to the optical blend of the stippling or impressionist technique. All right, so now I'm back the next day and I'm going to glaze the second layer on my glazing triad. I'm gonna do my fellow turquoise just because it was already on my palette overnight. And so I want to go ahead and use that up and what I'm doing here, it doesn't really matter that I'm avoiding the yellow. I'm doing that just for the video. But my yellow is dry and so you'll see that when I go over that dry yellow with this very transparent turquoise, I'm getting a really nice, vibrant green without these colors, physically or directly mixing together with each other. So now, after I've got this done, I'm going to let this dry overnight and then I'll be able to dio my final glazing layer and here we are. So I'm going to be putting a little bit of my magenta back on my palette. I don't want to squeeze out too much because I'm not needing very much and we will go ahead and just glaze that on top of the yellow and the blue, which are both dry at this points because I used my walnut oil, Al could medium, which here it is right there. And what's nice about mediums is that it does increase the transparency. So if you are interested in doing glazes and I will be having a course in the Siris on the this technique in more depth. But I do want to mention that a medium like a linseed oil or walnut oil will increase the transparency of your paints. However, it's important to know that you should only do glazes with paints that are already transparent, so that's a really important property to understand about your limited palate because you might have a combination of colors where some of them are transparent. Some of them are semi transparent or semi opaque or opaque. And what's important to know is that while this does increase the transparency of your color, it will not make an opaque color transparent in any real sense. What it will do is kind of make it cloudy. So that's something really important to understand about your colors and to know what kind of techniques are most suitable for what you are using. So here I'm adding my magenta. You can see I've got a really nice, vivid purple or violet where the blue and magenta intersect. And I'm actually getting a really nice, vibrant orange where the yellow and magenta intersect when I use this technique and I will show you a close up of all of this in just a second. But look at that black. That's amazing. And none of these colors air physically mixing with each other so you can see that this is a very powerful technique, and I'm going to show you this up close so you can see here in the glazing how these combined and what I really like about this technique is that just little specks of color show through the glaze, so you don't get just a even mixed like we do here. With the direct blending, you get a little bit more nuance and interest, so it's a really cool technique. And then here is the optical blending that is often used by Impressionist artists or post Impressionist artists. So you can see that these are all very different ways to combine your colors and you're not just limited Teoh physically mixing everything on your palate and then applying it. So experiment with different techniques and see what you like best.
29. Paint from Life Faster! Color Notes from Observation: as artists. We know how important it is to get practice painting from life and observation. But it can be really difficult to find time to dio on plain air studies. And in this video, I want to show you one strategy for doing a really quick planner study, and this is what I call taking color notes. So I am out. I'm actually on a break my lunch break, actually, and so I know that I don't have much time, so I have to make really quick decisions. And making quick decisions is difficult when you have a lot of colors on your palate and so plenty or painting, I think, is one area out of many areas where the limited palate really excels. So my strategy in doing a quick color note taking session is that I'm not worried at all about things like form or even composition. I'm only interested in capturing the nuances of color that I can observe. So I've started out with just my basic limited palette here, and at first I just mixed. A few of my secondary color is basically just a couple of greens, so a blue green and then more of a yellow, green and orange, and I kind of just got its start, got started from there, and I first blocked in all of the darkest values that I could see. So some of the greenery that is back behind this tree trunk, which that greenery isn't really my area of interest. What I really want to do is study this tree trunk and try to capture all of the subtle, little muted colors that I can observe in there. It's just such an interesting combination of warm neutrals, cool neutrals, some greens, even some oranges that I found in there. And I think that you could probably walk up to just about any tree and do a quick study of the colors that you observe, and you're going to find some very surprising colors. And again, my only goal here is to take know of some of these interesting colors that I'm observing. And so this is definitely not meant to be like a finished painting, and I think that that mindset really takes a lot of pressure off of planter painting. I think that we are so used to seeing other artists, especially on platforms like Instagram who they seem to go out into a planner painting every day, and it's basically a masterpiece. Well, I'm not quite there yet in my skills, and sometimes it does bother me. But I have to remind myself that this really is a skill that needs to be built over time and training yourself to get better at observational plate. Painting and painting really, really quickly is a matter of getting comfortable with a very limited palate and understanding the power of those colors. And not just that. But I think that this is really an exercise in color theory because we have to be very organized in our thinking in order to make thes quick decisions. So the first thing that I think about, of course, is value, and I first block in all of my darkest values. The next thing that I think about are the Hughes. What are the Hughes that I'm observing? Predominantly? Most likely, if I'm doing just a very concentrated study, I'm not going to have a whole range of hues that I'm dealing with, and I think that that makes it a little bit easier to because as I move on to chroma I don't have to think so much about having a range of reduced chroma mixes for a whole bunch of Hughes. So when I looked at this scene, I even before started painting decided that the predominant hues that I'm observing here are going to be some greens, some green blues, some yellow greens, some violets and then just a few accents of orange. And that is how I initially started mixing my palate. Now, at this point, I'm basically using a recycled color method for my mixing, and this is just kind of what comes more. Most naturally, it's me and allows me Teoh paint without thinking too much about reserving space all over my palate. So I'm a pretty messy painter, as I'm sure that you've noticed by now. So after I have my values blocked in and I started blocking in some of those dominant hues , now I'm just going in and refining some of the chroma shifts that I'm observing, especially in the trunk. And because that's my area of focus for the study, I'm going to spend most of my time just looking at that trunk and finding those little shifts in neutral colors that I can try to emphasize and then Onley toward the end of the painting in my beginning to use lighter colors and beginning to mix whites in here. I do have a little bit of my medium here on my palette. I don't always bring a medium out to do planner painting, quite frankly, because insects are attracted to the mediums and oils that we use. An oil painting they, I guess, have a taste for linseed oil and walnut oil. So that's just something to keep in mind. They were kind of bugging me a little bit, but I was only out for just a few minutes, and I feel like the study was pretty successful, really. Taking notes from nature and just gathering information about color is really just about splashing paint around and not worrying at all about the composition, the form, any kind of drawing. I don't even do a preliminary sketch because I'm really just focused on color for these studies and then the next time that I need to paint a tree trunk from a photograph and I just can't see all of this interesting color information from that photo. This will inform my process
30. Master Color Study - Selection: many people decide that they want to learn to paint because they admire great arts, and it can often feel a little bit discouraging, especially when you're starting out Teoh. See how truly difficult it can be to master color, and I think that one really great way Teoh Master Color is to study how the masters handled color, Makes Sense, writes. So what I have here is a book of John Singer Sargent paintings that I own, and basically I have a view finder that I use in planter painting often, and this would be a really difficult composition for me to try to do a master study of because there's so much going on. So what I'm going to dio is find a many composition within this larger composition using my viewfinder. And if you don't have a viewfinder, of course, you can just use your hands or you can use paper. You can cut out a square, and I would encourage you to look all over the composition because it may not necessarily be that you want to study the main focal point of the painting, where there is the most visual interest and especially like right Now I'm debating whether I really want to dio a study that contains faces because that's of course, going to just make things a little bit more challenging. But of course, that is where the main focus of this painting is. It's with those little girls. So I'm just looking all around and kind of judging the compositions, finding a lot of really good ones, actually. But I think that what I'm so interested in and what attracts me to this painting it's truly one of my favorite paintings is the glow from the lanterns and then the glow on the faces of the girls. So I think that that's probably what I will end up going with here. And since I'm using a physical book, I'm going to have Teoh protect my book, and it's gonna look a little silly to you on camera. But I would definitely recommend finding a way Teoh protect your book. If that's what you're using, however, you can also go onto a website such as Wiki art and find high resolution pictures of many, many great artworks. Unfortunately, John Singer Sargent doesn't have a lot of works on that particular website. He does have some, however. Ah, but there is a wealth of paintings on there, and you can download the high resolution version. And I would really encourage you, of course, to either crop it digitally or find a way where you're focusing on just one area of the painting so that you don't get overwhelmed. So here's how I'm going to be protecting my precious book because, of course I know myself. I know that I am a messy painter and I really value this book, so I know that you're getting a lot of glare on the camera. But once I have this covered and I have my book position where I can view it, I'm really not gonna be too bothered by the glare. And my main objective, of course, is just to make sure that my book is protected. All right, so the next thing I'm going to do is just physically attach may viewfinder to the composition that I chose. So I did choose to dio one of the lanterns illuminating the face of a little girl. But we're going to do this in a very methodical and simple way that makes the process a little bit easier
31. Master Color Study - Color Strings: Now that we have our composition selected, I'm going to show you a pretty unique way. Teoh, address this color study and I want to say right off the bat that this is a color study. It is not a master study, and so we are not at all concerned with accuracy, especially as it pertains Teoh form and drawing. So what I'm going to encourage you to dio is to create a grid minus five by five years does not have to be. You can have more squares of this. I probably wouldn't recommend having fewer, however, so at least five by five squares or whatever dimension you happen to be using mine is a square, and then you're going to select a limited palate. And I do not necessarily want you to choose your limited palate based on the colors that you observe in the painting that you're doing the master color study of I want to encourage you to use the colors that you want to be your primary limited color palette, because this exercise is going to help you really push that pallet Teoh achieve things that you wouldn't necessarily think possible. So if you recall that this painting has a lot of nice fuchsias, and magenta is and pinks all over it. And what I have on my palette for my read is basically just kind of a warm or just threaten . So what I'm gonna do here is begin to mix some color strings ahead of time. I've got my book over to my side, and I'm basically taking no of the value and the temperature of different general areas of the painting. And that's how I'm mixing my color strings. And I want to emphasize that I'm not trying to match these colors to the colors that I'm observing in the painting. I'm just trying to get generally the value, and I'm trying to get the direction that it's leaning in terms of the hue. So if it's kind of, ah, dark, bluish green, that's what I'm going for. And I am paying attention to chroma, of course, as well. And so as I need to reduce chroma, I'm looking for opportunities. Teoh mix in some complementary colors, and I don't have any raw number on my palate, er, anything like that. I want to keep everything very colorful and I want to push myself to use very chromatic mixes. I see a lot of artists doing master color studies, and they try Teoh, go back and kind of reengineer everything that went into the painting and try to figure out the precise colors that the artist would have used. But that is not going to be the purpose of this exercise. This is not a an exercise in historical painting. This is an exercise in you getting to know your limited palate, and I'm mixing up a lot of color strings here. But that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to be using every single mixture that I create in the painting. What I'm doing is I'm giving myself a lot of options to use. So again I am looking at the value of the mix. I'm looking at the chroma I'm looking at, which you it's leaning toward, and I just want to give myself a really nice variety. And so that's all that I'm doing here. Yes, I'm looking at my reference to kind of get a general sense of some of the more dominant colors and especially because I want to make sure that I mix up a larger quantity of the colors that I see more of in that painting because I don't want to have to constantly be remixing if I don't have to. Of course, that's a little bit inevitable. So don't worry too much about this. Just give yourself a nice variety. Pay attention to what colors are dominant. Which colors take up the most space so that you can mix accordingly and just have a nice variety of not only your Hughes. So I created lots of secondary and even a tertiary here and giving myself some value ranges as well as some variation in my chroma. And not only do I want a lot of range and diversity in micro Mazz, I want to pay attention to the areas of the painting that are the brightest of the most chromatic. So in this example, it's going to be the lanterns, so I want to make sure that I mix up some colors for the lanterns that are a pretty full chroma. Maybe not a completely full chroma, just maybe a little bit reduced, because oftentimes using a full chroma color in a painting can make it feel separate or disjointed from the rest of the painting. And so we do want to keep in mind that we want a nice harmony. Everything exists all in one environment under a particular lighting situation. And so we don't want to deviate that in favor of just trying to make things artificially bright. All right, so we've got our color strings mixed here. And now we're going. Teoh, proceed with a block in phase.
32. Master Color Study - Block-In: All right. So this is where this project gets a little bit interesting. We're going to do a rough blocking, and this time, when I say blocking, I really mean that we are just painting blocks. So what I'm doing is I'm looking at my reference, and I'm just trying to determine what is the average color here. And how can I use what I've mixed to best apply that. So what I'm applying here is a dark value reddish violet mix, So this might be a little bit reduced in chroma, but at this value, you can't really see that too clearly, I do know that this is a red dominant violet then right next to it and in particular looked particularly looking at the top of the little girl's head. And one thing that I really like about this painting, and also don't quite understand is all of the lighting situations that are happening in this composition. And so I'm a little bit intrigued by the fact that the top of this little girl's head has kind of this bluish violet color to it. So it's not quite as dark. And then as I move over, I'm looking more at the background and obviously there are some nice pink flowers in the background up against the dark green leaves of the hedge. But I am not going to be painting in those flowers just yet. They will come. But right now, as I said, I am painting in Onley an average of each one of these areas. So I'm going to be ignoring all details, all nuances, and I'm really looking at this as if it is a very, very pixelated version of this painting. So I'm having to make decisions. I'm having to really generalize about what I'm seeing, and basically I am laying in a foundation and this is very similar to the block ins that I do for my other paintings, except that this is not nearly as organic. So my shapes are not organic. They're going to be literally like pixels. And I think that this is a really good exercise, not only in studying color but also in appreciating the abstraction of all art. So even artists who are doing highly realistic work, they are still abstract artists at the very core, because art is always an abstraction, we cannot create a world Ah, physical world. With paints, we can only create a representation of a world. And so I think it's good Teoh be able to disconnect yourself from the subject matter and just focus on color in this example. So again, we're not going to be worrying. Hear about any kind of drawing whatsoever? I'm basically scanning my reference kind of judging it one piece at a time and just trying my best to estimate what would be the most appropriate color that belongs there now, right here in this area. This was a tough decision because this is right where the lamp is. And I just happened to know that because in oil painting we do try to paint from our darker values up to our lighter values that I need to put in a foundation of color that's a little bit darker than what I'm actually observing in that lantern, so that would I go back to refine it. I will not be putting darker colors on top of lighter colors because that usually does not work out too well. So here I'm going to go ahead and block in the little girl's face, and this is going to look pretty funny. Kind of like a Minecraft character. If you're familiar with the Minecraft game and this is just to help you again, just detach yourself from the subject matter and just keep it very, very abstract and trust in the process. This exercise isn't about again having a master copy of the work. We just want to study the color. And so, in order to focus on the color, we want to push other elements to the back. So now let's move on.
33. Master Color Study - Refining: So now we've got our blocking finished and we are going to be it refining this again. This is not a study of the actual forms of the painting. This is on Lee, a study of color. But what we have here is a nice foundation on which we can build up from. So what I'm going to be doing is looking for the more nuanced color that I see in the composition. And I'm just painting it directly on top of this block in. I did this all at once. So my blocking is still completely wet at this point. And I would encourage you to try to do this while it's still wet in an alla prima technique and not wait for it to dry because some of these color interactions that we're going to get as we apply more paint on top of wet paint are really important. So here you can see that I'm beginning to kind of cut into some of the shapes again. I don't need this to actually look like the little girl in the original painting, but I do want Teoh start setting myself up to be able Teoh add more nuanced color, which will be much easier to dio if her head is not just a block. And you can see to asl ong as you follow the fat over lean principle which, if you haven't seen my skill share video on that. It's a really good thing to understand for oil painters, and this is especially important if you are doing alla prima work where you're applying what pain on top of paint, that is still what So when I first applied the paint, I applied it very lean, so I didn't add much medium to it. I did at a little bit just to keep everything really pliable. But as I progress, I can use just a little bit more medium so that the paint will sit on top of that wet paint . And I also can begin to apply Maurin Pasta techniques in Pashto is where you allow your paint to remain very thick, and you don't push it into your surface or try to have it be smooth. You let the paint kind of sit on top and have a little bit of texture, and that would be something that you would wait until you're just almost finished painting to do, because once you apply some imposter, so strokes, you're definitely not going to be able to apply more paint on top of that. So now I'm just going around noticing some of the different color nuances on her face. So the orange kind of by her eyes. And now I'm beginning to build up the lantern again, building on top of my darker colors and building up to the lighter colors, and that is going to help me achieve a really nice glow here. And as I look back at my reference by John Singer Sargent again, I am not trying. Teoh mimic his exact colors. What I'm trying to do is explore the relationships between these colors because that's what it truly is about. It's not about having a tube of paint for every conceivable color that you can imagine. It's about working with what you have and working with relationships of color color. As much as we can study it through them and sell system, and we can categorize it in very logical and rational ways. Color remains subjective for us, and color always exist within some context. I read something interesting recently that said that without other colors, no color would exist. So basically, if you just had one color, it wouldn't really be a color because it's on Lee a color when we can contrast it with something else. And I think that that is a really important thing to understand about color in art and painting. Nothing exists in isolation, and we can create really interesting effects just by the relationships between the colors that we apply. So again, it's not about the specific colors. It's about the way that they are relating to each other within the composition. That makes all of the difference. And I think that the great Masters really understood this. I do not think that any of the masters were ever held up by lack of color. In fact, they couldn't be because they didn't have all of the color options that we have today. They had to make do with what they had, and they used relationships to create certain effects. For example, if you are familiar with the Zorn palette, this is a particular palette that is known for its use by Anders Zorn. However, many artists used this particular palette. It did not contain a blue and blue is a color that is relatively new to us. Yes, there were blues going back a long time ago, but those pigments were very expensive and difficult to come by. So a lot of artists resorted to using black in place of blue. And it might be difficult to paint a nice blue sky when all you have is black. But if you contrast that with a lot of orange in the foreground, then you can create a sense of blue without it literally being blue. So, yes, it is about the relationships and not about the specific colors. Sinologist show you a little close up of what I've got. And I was pretty happy with the result a little bit surprised, actually buy it. And this was a really fun project. And I think that you guys should just give it a try and enjoy it again. Don't try to copy. The master just tried to study the color relationships that they employed and that will help you so much
34. Outro: Thank you so much for taking this course. I hope that you enjoyed it. And I especially hope that you learned a lot. I really look forward to seeing your project shared and any questions that you might have. Please feel free. Teoh Toe. Ask those in the discussion section of this class. I know that there's a lot of projects in this class and I don't want you to feel overwhelmed. So again, I hope that you really took your time through this class. I hope you focused on just one project at a time. And if you ran into any challenges or you have ideas of other things that should have been covered in this course I heard you let me know in the discussion section so that I can add additional content to this course again. Thank you so much. I look forward to seeing your projects and happy painting