Color Play

In pastels or any dry medium, the more colors you have, the easier it is to create the best effects. My ideal palette has all the primaries and secondaries in warm and cool versions with at least two tints and one shade of each, plus some muted colors, grays and earth browns also with tints and shades. Of course I don't always have my ideal palette at hand, especially if I want to sketch outdoors.

Above is a color wheel with every stick in my 24 Color Conte set laid out on medium brown Aquabee Bogus Recycled Rough Paper. White, gray and black form a bull's eye at the center. Yellow at the top, red at the left and blue to the right is a common primary triad layout.

If you didn't get this in grade school, the color wheel is the first thing most people learn about color. Primary colors are red, yellow and blue. They can't be created by mixing other colors. Secondary colors are orange, green and violet, which can be mixed by various proportions of spectrum primaries. Inevitably using children's art supplies, the red and blue produce a murky gray.

"It's the pigments" is what my kindergarten teacher told me as I scowled at that muck. "The red and the blue pigment aren't pure, they have a little yellow in them, so it turns gray." I was mad that the manufacturers had not included good spectrum primaries in the tempera line. Today's kid paints usually do, so I must not have been the only disgruntled kindergartener.

But the color wheel is much more useful than you'd think. Everything has a hue. A gray can be a blue-gray leaning toward green or toward violet, a brown might be closest to red, orange or yellow. Mix complementary colors (exact opposites on the color wheel) and you mute them. They become brownish or grayish but may still retain their identity. The color of my laptop case is actually a metallic deep dark orange.

When you make color wheels with any new art supplies, you begin to find out exactly what those mixtures can do and what you can do with them. You can also use color to create or control emphasis in any part of a painting later on when you've thoroughly experimented with your supplies - including a short palette of a dry medium. It's one thing doing color harmonies with 132 Prismacolors or more - recently they pushed that up to 150 and I know I need those other 18 pencils. It's much harder when you only have 24 sticks and really want three tints and a shade of every spectrum hue including tertiaries like red-violet or yellow-green and a good range of muted colors with their tints and shades.

I mixed my primaries by overlaying them. Red and the spectrum blue mixed evenly. Yellow and Red or Yellow and Blue took double doses of yellow, one under and one over, to get a secondary hue between the primaries. That's the kind of thing I test out with a new dry medium when I create these charts and color wheels. I blended with my sticks but you can do optical mixing by crosshatching or dotting, or finger smudge to get a smooth blend. It's your color wheel, do it your way.

I also wanted to place every stick that isn't a pure spectrum hue where it belongs on the circle. I put tints going inward by just going over the colors with the white stick, since a small set of color Conte doesn't have light yellow, light pink, light blue or even a couple of versions. It takes practice mixing the hue and value you want, although these hard pastels are particularly good mixers.

Then I put the secondary hues next to their mixed versions and tinted those up too going toward the outside. Very useful information if I'm sketching on the spot. I'd rather find out in a diagram like this that I need to use very little violet and a lot of white to get lavender, or that the purple stick is more red-purple than pure purple.

One thing that can be very useful is to look at the colors you have and see what combinations suggest themselves. My Conte set naturally includes Sanguine, a dark orangy red, and an earth orange that's more muted than the orange stick. The blue is very bright, but using white to lighten it and shades the sky also mutes it a little. If I want to sketch autumn foliage, I'll get a richer effect using the sanguine, earth orange and peach stick than I would using the bright orange stick. The complementary background would possibly make a bright orange tree too garish.

Here's how it looks in combination:



But if I want to make a more muted color look bright, using a fully saturated complement or near-complement behind it will do so. The dark blue-violet stick is a good match for the peach stick as a complement, using it as if it's a yellow. This could work with a yellow ochre tint too. I used the muted orange stick to shade it rather than the bright orange. You can see how it pops out against that background!

Below is an autumn tree sketch done with the Sanguine, Earth Orange and Peach colors against a spectrum blue sky shaded up with white. I used Olive green on the hill, but decided to jazz that up with a little of the muted orange so that it'd have more variegation. That made it stand out better against the sky and look more lively.

Test out color ideas like that in a small way. This is another good sketchbook exercise, something to do if you don't have much time for your daily art but want to keep the habit. Working only a couple of inches tall keeps you from overdetailing and shows the effects of color just as well as a large painting.



What does the brown paper do in all this color play? It makes the warm colors brighter by reinforcing them. It also brightens the cool colors I used. Look closely at the above examples, the blues, greens and violets in particular. Brown flecks from the paper create the same shimmering intensity for those cool colors that the cool colors do for the muted-warms subjects.

It's okay in pasteling to let some of the paper color come through, or in sketching. Either of the two drawings is comparable to the kind of color study I might do out in the field if I saw a flower I liked or a tree against the sky.

A mid-value paper lets me see how light my light colors are easily and how dark my darks are. With some subjects I might just sketch in the shadows and highlights, letting the paper form the middle tones. Gray is more neutral but it'll work the same way. Brown gives more warmth though, and for landscape sketching it does more to help complement all those greens and blues of sky, foliage and water.

So when you're warming up to do a serious painting or when you get new supplies, consider charting them in a color wheel as well as a row of swatches. Mix any hues you use often and place anything not exactly in the spectrum brights around the outside nearest to its color family. Constantly redoing color wheels will help you handle the muted colors better. They too can form a good spectrum.

You can also use muted colors as a primary triad to see what happens. This exercise on white paper is a color wheel done with a muted primary triad from the same box of Conte crayons. Sanguine for red, the light orange/peach color for yellow and gray for blue. I used a little black and white in it too, mostly to darken the gray. It's the equivalent of something like the Zorn palette in painting, using warm colors with black substituting for blue.

It works well for two reasons. One, black pigments including those mixed with white to form gray sticks often have a blue cast in themselves. This is as true in paint as it is in pastel sticks, they're all done with the same artist pigments or inexpensive hue pigments.

The second reason is that a true neutral color, like gray, will take on the look of a complementary color to a color placed next to it. Put a red dot on a gray card and the card will look gray-green. Or here, where I placed an orange-reddish autumn tree sketch against a gray sky, it looks like a blue sky albeit not a bright blue sky. The gray mixed with the peach stick and a little black in the darker areas turns greenish because the blue cast of the black mixes with the yellow in the peach stick.

That light color looked much pinker on the brown paper by itself. On white it looked more like a warm yellow. So what values and hues are around any color will affect how it looks. The more you play with this, the more effectively you can handle it in a painting. Wouldn't an autumn forest against a stormy gray sky make a powerful scene?



So experiment with your mediums. Art journals are great for this, along with other sketchbooks. The more you play with your art supplies, the more masterfully you'll handle color in a serious painting. This is also something you can do when you're not feeling inspired, or if you feel discouraged about the quality of your painting.

Just doing color wheels and mixing diagrams starts to remind you how fun it is. You may get an idea from a subject by the exact mixture you created or by trying out a weird triad like substituting the secondaries for primaries. Green, violet and orange as your three mixing colors will produce an interesting but coherent color harmony - why not test them out in your art journal?

Enjoy!

Planning a Painting

Planning a painting was completely foreign to me for decades.

For most of my life I just drew or painted. I have sketchbooks where I used only a dozen pages because every time I drew something, I noodled over it to create a finished drawing as close to realism as I could get. I learned to sketch after I learned to draw.

That may be common for many self taught artists. As a beginner, realism is impressive and accuracy is the most obvious visible thing to learn. Later on, I discovered that details are actually easy and it's composition and design that make the difference between a good drawing or painting and a "technically perfect but somehow lifeless" one. The "technically perfect" part usually means "Overdetailed and laid out badly."

You can't argue with exact proportions copied from a photo until you're advanced enough to understand what the distortions of photography are. There are some real ones. Photorealists copy them on purpose to create large paintings that look like photos but are created in more durable materials by flawless craftsmanship... and they essentially use a camera for a sketchbook to do it.

Above is my first planning drawing for a wombat painting I'm doing for my Australian friend Lauren, part of a swap package I'm sending her for some cool Australian art supplies she's already sent. I was testing the Derwent Onyx pencil so I went ahead and did a fairly detailed little drawing with a sketchier background.

Where that's useful for planning the final painting is that I got familiar with the animal's proportions and textures. I tried one of the two references I liked and decided to see how it'd look in pencil. It didn't take long because it wasn't very large. The final painting will be larger.

Next, I tried the other reference in a pen and wash sketch. The penwork washed too dark so I wasn't completely happy with it. I shouldn't have washed it. But that taught me something and I won't make that mistake again, texturing all over with little hair strokes to shadow the fur if I'm going to wash it. Less is more in pen and wash if I want accurate values.



The point of both of these sketches was to just get some practice with the animal's proportions and a feel for the anatomy. I was satisfied after the first one, but wanted to see if the second reference would be better. It wasn't, I like the first reference more and not just because of the blurry botch of the wash on this. I remember how it looked without washing and this one was a bit more static.

Then I did something counter-intuitive. I sketched from the first reference again, this time simplifying it so much that it's just some blobby shapes in Tombow dual tip brush pens. This is a value mass thumbnail. I was planning where the lights and darks would go in the final version.



Doing a simpler, looser sketch of something I'd already drawn well the first time around seemed silly. It's not though. It made me think about where the areas of medium, darker and lighter values can go in the final painting. When I'm working in color I can group my pastels or oil pastels into value categories - medium-light, medium value, medium-dark. At that point I can play with color and give added depth or emphasis where I want it.

The brightest colors show up most in the Medium value category except for yellows and blues or violets. Yellows are brightest in the light-medium range, violet and some blues are brightest in the medium-dark range. Lighter or darker values than the tone of the pure color will start to mute color - but that also lets me use unusual colors and get away with it. Pearly grays that are mixes of pink, green, violet and peach are a lot richer than plain old gray. Deep darks that shimmer with reds, violets, greens and blues are lively compared to flat black.

You don't have to stick to what you did in the planning sketches. As soon as I looked at this value planning thumbnail, I noticed that I had bright morning light with a very strong shadow under the animal. Yet the light background and foreground was cool - it made me think of a misty morning. To do that, I had to lighten and fade out that cast shadow almost completely, so I decided to try that in a color study and see how it worked.



Here's the color study for the painting, done in colored pencils on a Borden & Riley ATC pad, 2 1/2" x 3 1/2". I knew the color study would be pretty enough as a small drawing in its own right that I might as well put it into a plastic top loader and send Lauren the color study too. This isn't the finished painting.

It's a little test of the colors for the finished painting. One that I might change my mind on - I like some aspects of it and not others. I might disperse the mist and put something else behind the animal, go back to the bright sunny look in the reference now that I see how the "Mist" idea worked out.

By doing a lot of preliminary drawings for this painting, I've accomplished several things. One of the biggest is that I've got some ideas on the composition. Every time I try it, I'm refining the composition ideas. Another equally important element is that I've got much more experience with cats than wombats. So drawing the wombat four times in different ways has given me a better idea of how it's shaped, how it moves, how its fur lays on its body.

I might continue doing more preliminary drawings till I'm ready to design the final painting. Or I might plunge into it later today. Either way, I know doing all these early sketches will help. Each one is a small easy project that didn't have to be flawless to be useful. I'd much rather make those mistakes on a tiny ATC or a small area in a sketchbook than have to correct them on a full sized painting on good sanded pastel paper. It'll save me hours of reworking to get all this trial and error behind me before I get out the expensive stuff.