by Will Kemp with Will Kemp Art School

Let’s be honest, colour mixing can be frustrating.

You’ve mastered the colour wheel, you understand complementary colours and may have either dabbled with a few different colour schemes but why do you paintings still not work?

Why don’t they balance and create harmony to your eye?

What are you doing wrong?

In this series of guest posts for ArtInstructionBlog.com,  I want to address some of the common stumbling blocks of colour and analyze some master pieces to try and see how past masters have managed to balance seemingly impossible colour mixtures – so you can help to find your own unique palette

The clue staring you in the face

To understand colour you have to think like a detective, look for the clues and piece sections together. And sometimes the clues can be right under your nose, literally.

Have you looked in the mirror this morning?

Not for a self portrait, or pencil study but to try to understand your personal relationship with colours. We are often subconsciously drawn towards colours that match and compliment our skin tone.

I’m cool. You know, like the Fonz! I also have cool skin tones, pale skin and am drawn to colours that balance with that and are quite muted. I very rarely wear bright red and only use it in a minimal amount in my landscape paintings.

Now, of course, this isn’t a exact science, but have a look through the colours in your wardrobe and start to see if any of the colours that pop up in your clothes, pop up in your paintings.

The self expression of colour

Colour is such a personal thing.

Artists often go through different periods depending on their emotional state, or sometimes you’ve just tried a new colour for a change and it starts a whole new area of interest.

Colour is all about relationships, either warm and cool, harmony and contrast, balance or conflict.

Sometimes you will read a recommended palette of colours by an artist, try it yourself at home yet something just doesn’t sit right. It doesn’t ring true for you.

You have to experiment to weed out the colours you don’t like and keep the colours you have an affinity with close to hand.

Create a mood board

A mood board is often used in the design industry to develop a brand, you can use the same techniques on a voyage of self discovery to discover your own colour palette.

Step 1. Tear out pictures magazines, copy from a google search, upload photos from your camera. What you need to do is to amass a collection of images ( they don’t have to all be paintings) to start to try and see some common trends.

Step 2. layout a collection of your images to create a ‘mood board’  to start to try and see a theme. Some artists favour a sombre palette, so earth colours would be a natural choice, others prefer bright, vivid colours so maybe try some man made quinacridones.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/11/moodboard-interior-design

Step 3. Try and identify the palettes that you are drawn towards.

Palettes change

When painting things are in a state of flux, it really is a matter of personal taste.

The palette of colours that you come to use will be like your personal identity, a thumbprint that is uniquely yours, and as Picasso’s palette changed throughout his career, so will yours.

At the moment I’m slightly obsessed with Indian red, I love how much it changes when you add white, compared to using it in thin glazes. But I don’t recommend it to my students who are just starting out because the colour jumps can be too much and too unpredictable.

An emotional response

Colour is often steeped in emotion, and causes emotional responses in us. Red can be danger or passion and heightens the senses, blue can be calm to some and make others feel restless.

Often, when you start painting you are searching for a ‘style’ yet this style can seem obvious to outsiders looking in but allude you for a lot longer.

The first artist we are going to look at is Claude Monet.

“Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.”

Claude Monet

Waterlilies: Green Reflections, 1914-…

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I first really fell in love with Monet on a trip to Paris when I was at art college. I’d always thought his work was ‘nice’ but I didn’t truly appreciate it until I saw it in the flesh, particularly the Water Lilies in the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris.

It was a chilly morning on the street of Paris and I’d just had my morning croissant and expresso and was ticking off the gallery list. I wandered into the next gallery on my list and wasn’t expecting much…. and then I turned the corner into the room.

The first thing that hits you is the scale.

They are huge.

I sat down and became fully immersed in the picture.

When viewing the paintings up close you notice the rapid brushstrokes and array of colours yet step back, take a seat and relax and you melt into them.

The view encompasses you and you have a real feeling of inner calm. You feel as if you are sitting next to Monet painting the scene.

But how do you create this deep connection in your own works?

Now the atmosphere of the gallery and the aura of the piece certainly helps but what about the colours he used. How did they effect my emotional reaction?

And how can you adapt his techniques to help in your own paintings.

The first thing that Monet uses is the effect of broken colour.

The broken colours are very close in tone, so there isn’t a very big visual shift for your eye.

In fact, he has created a haze of colour. There isn’t really an inch of canvas that doesn’t have a brushstroke containing all 4 of the key colours, light purple, muted blue, green and yellow

It is this technique that makes it so harmonious as a painting.

So next time you’re half way through a painting and you’ve just added a stroke of colour in the sky, try to use that exact same colour somewhere in the foreground and visa versa.

This will help the viewers eye to dance around the painting.

Monet also draws our focus to the front of the painting both by the use of contrast and the use of the strong bright blue.

Notice how he uses what I call the ‘trickle effect,’ imagine pouring some water from the top of your canvas and the water flows wherever the light falls.

Monet has used strokes of a darker blue to ‘trickle’ light towards the foreground, again creating movement.

Look carefully on the lefthand side to see a subtle triangle of darker blue.

This is another method of adding harmony by distributing the same colour, dark blue throughout the piece.

If you ever get the chance to visit Paris, I highly recommend a Monet moment and don’t forget the croissant!

Over to you.

Have you got any tips for creating the Monet effect?

What’s your colour palette at the moment?

About the Author Will Kemp can teach you how to draw & paint. He is shortly starting a new online drawing course for absolute beginners.

About Brian Rice:

Brian was born on May 25,1958 and his roots are in the small outport of Pilleys Island, Newfoundland, Canada. At the age of nineteen he moved to central Canada in the Sarnia, Ontario area, where he now works in the Petrochemical industry.

His interest in art began in high school, when an art teacher encouraged him. In 1979 he began to paint realistic images of Newfoundland and northern wildlife, using an acrylic medium. He has many admirers of his work and most of the paintings have been sold; many were commissions. In 1998 he did a painting of an old united church (circa 1945) for his hometown heritage society. Prints were made and sold as a fund raiser.

In 1997 he entered an art contest in Sarnia. This contest was held to select a winner to commemorate the new blue water bridge. The painting got an honourable mention and it was reproduced as a limited edition print.

Brian has no formal training in art. He is self taught and learns most from a careful observation of the order and design of the natural world . He believes that “nature is the artwork of a creator/master artist who displays a wisdom and a genius that we have only begun to understand”. His focus is to create art that will cause the soul to search for a deeper meaning in an increasingly chaotic world.

He started striving for a photo realism style in the 1990′s and achieved it to some degree, but, he found the style did not evoke much emotion and set out on a journey to find a style that was realistic but, with a much looser impressionistic approach.

Eighteen of his paintings were on display at his hometown Petrolia Library during the Summer of 2004.

The Painting “The Newfoundland Cabin” appeared in “Guest Gallery “which is a page in the downhomer magazine; www.Downhome.com is the biggest magazine on the Canadian eastcoast with 26,000 subscribers. This magazine also has a gallery and gift shop in St. John’s, Newfoundland which now carries prints of the painting “seasons of life”

Brian’s Websites:

http://paintingsbybrianrice.blogspot.com/

http://sites.google.com/site/paintingsbybrianrice/

In Calm Waters – An Acrylic Painting Demonstration

Last summer I fished for cod , in Newfoundland, in an area where a lone minke whale was feeding. The water that evening was flat calm and the whale was after some sort of small fish that flickered on the water. It got close to us at times as we fished for cod. This painting tries to capture that moment in time as I remember it. This is an 18′ x 24″ acrylic painting on panel.

Heres a link to read about minke whales.

I prepared my 18” x 24 “ cradled panel with three coats of gesso. On the 2nd and 3rd coat I added a little paynes gray and cobalt blue . I sanded each coat with 220 grit sand paper, and the last coat I sanded with 400 grit sandpaper to get a very smooth surface especially in the bottom half portion of the panel.

This mid tone of color in the gesso gave me that perfect ground color for further glazing of colors in the water area .

I mixed parchment white , paynes gray, crimson ( napthol red and quin voilet) and cobalt blue with glazing liquid for my first coat of acrylic paint. I blended my painting to get a slow transition from yellow /blue/ gray at the top to deep cobalt blue at the bottom.

Then I glazed in layers of yellows, crimson , cobalt blue in the water to get the effect I needed.

The back ground trees and hills were blocked in with a combination of hookers green and yellow ochre

I added more detail in the hills and trees . The sun is going down behind the hill on the left and so a strong shadow and reflection is cast upon the water there. This dark area would later balance the whale color in the center of the painting. I added the ripples on the water . A few more glazes , I think I introduced a little naples yellow at this point.

I added texture to the hill on the left to form the trees and help the viewer get a sense of depth and this contrast with the lighter hills in the distance gave a greater sense of aerial perspective.

I added the whale in a place that best suited the composition. I know the rule about not putting your main subject focus in the middle but in this case it seemed to work best. The whale is made with cobalt blue and paynes gray.

You can can see the small fish flickering ahead of the whale as the whale dives quickly to try and get a mouth full.

I touched up the trees the rocks etc, with raw umber and paynes grey, and a little parchment white .

I will get a better photo when the sun comes out but this is what I got so far. Your comments are always appreciated.

I made some changes and uploaded a new photo of the final painting.

About Sandrine Pelissier

I grew up in France but have been living in Canada for the last 12 years, I am currently located in North Vancouver and work from a studio on Pemberton Avenue.

Watercolor is my medium of choice because of the unique way it allows me to render light. The transparency of this medium can make it look like the painting is lit from behind and the light is shining through the paper In my portraits, I like to tell stories about the people around me. I am very interested in childhood fantasy or fairy tales (I wish it would snow Flowers, Hair Balloon, Georgia, the Spanish dress and the Eclectus Parrot). I also like to induce a dialogue with the viewer in some paintings dealing more with introspection and mood (Mixed, In the studio).

Those portraits are not about likeness or knowing the people that are being painted, as I see my models as actors in a movie, they are the faces that will allow me to tell a story or to show emotions. Those faces are a source of endless fascination and I find the subtlety that can be achieved with watercolor well suited to the complexity of the human face.

My technique involves the accumulation of many transparent layers of watercolor. Then I like to incorporate mixed media in the background, work sometimes with some contouring. I also sometimes like to add some drawing on top of the painting or some graphic elements…

Sandrine’s Website

Sandrine’s Blog

Visit Sandrine’s Print Shop by Clicking the Banner Below:

Exhibition: A demonstration in layering acrylics

Exhibition : Acrylic on canvas

My charcoal drawing on the canvas, made from a picture my daughter took.

Here, my first layer of black. I am trying to paint with colors that are in contrast with the local colors.

Painting more contrasting colors.

All this layering will help making colors more complex at the end and having interesting and contrasting edges.

Here I start another phase of layering, with colors I found in undertones of the local colors

For example some of the light on the ceiling have blue undertones.

Here I start to apply local colors.

I keep them semi-transparent by adding medium so some of the layering underneath is still visible.

Adjusting local colors and correcting some of the figure shapes.

Final – Exhibition : Acrylic on canvas

Learn how to mix a bright pink using acrylic paint with this free acrylic painting tutorial from award winning Artist and teacher Will Kemp from Will Kemp Art School.  This is the second video lesson that I have featured here from Will as I simply love his teaching style.  Check out his other lesson on my site on mixing greens with acrylic paint here.

For this particular lesson, Will is using the following acrylic colors from  Golden &
Winsor & Newton: Cadmium Red Light, Cadmium Red Medium, Alizarin Crimson Hue, Alizarin Crimson Permanent, Quinacridone Red and  Titanium White.

In order to mix a true pink, you need red and white, but as this video will demonstrate, not all reds on your palette will make a nice bright pink and you really won’t be able to tell when looking at a color straight out of the tube.  You need to add white to a color to determine the best red for the job.

Will begins the lesson using Cadmium Red Light.  This will not produce a bright pink as Cadmium Red Light has an orange bias to it and as you will see, the addition of white will dull this mixture considerably.

The Cadmium Red Medium is also not a very good choice as it will also dull considerably when mixed with white.

The Permanent Alizarin Crimson is  better than the first two.  You wouldn’t think it would be when you compare these colors straight from the tube.  The Permanent Alizarin maintains its intensity better with the addition of white.

The Alizarin Crimson Hue appears to lean more towards a purple with the addition of white, especially when you compare it to the Cadmium Red.

Finally we arrive at our last color, Quinacridone Red.  This color appears to be the best choice when you want a bright pink on your palette as it stays the brightest with the addition of titanium white.   Enjoy the lesson!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGRRj8Wn_5w

A big thanks to Will Kemp for sharing this wonderful video demo.  Check out his YouTube Channel Here for more free videos like the one above.  You can also visit his Website Here for more great resources from Will

Here is a wonderful video created by Artist and Instructor Will Kemp from Will Kemp Art School.  In this video, he will teach you how to create a variety of beautiful greens using acrylic paints.

If you spend any time outdoors observing nature, then you must already know the variety of greens that are there.  There are warm yellow greens, cool blue greens, bright greens and dull greens.  So you may find it rather challenging when it comes time to mix your own greens out of acrylic paint.  There are some beautiful tubed greens on the market, but to really match the vast amount of greens that appear in nature, you must learn how to mix your own.

By the way, this video will work just as well with Oil Paints.  While we are on the topic , you may want to also check out another post I put together a while back on mixing greens here.  You may also want to check out a fantastic DVD created by my good friend Richard Robinson called Mastering Color.  Back to the lesson at hand.

For this particular demonstration, Will is using Golden Heavy Body Acrylics, which are fantastic paints.  If you haven’t tried them out yet, you can buy them online here at a great price.

The colors you will need if you will be following along are Burnt Umber, Cadmium Yellow Light, Carbon Black, Ultramarine Blue and Pthalo Blue (Green Shade).  These 5 colors alone will produce a wonderful variety of greens.

After you have gone through this exercise, try the exercise again only try using different colors.  You could use a different yellow for instance or perhaps a different blue.  Try adding oranges like Burnt Sienna or Cadmium Orange.  You will be amazed at the endless amount of greens you can create.  Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiH3k41YY_E

A big thanks to Will Kemp for sharing this wonderful video demo.  Check out his YouTube Channel Here for more free videos like the one above.  You can also visit his Website Here for more great resources from Will.