making new friends among artists. Artists and musicians
simply are some of the neatest people to know and be
around.
We'll be having dinner together Friday night, break some
ice...talk about Saturday morning, and then for two days
we'll be paint'n up a storm on various sites I have picked
out here in NE Wisconsin.
This afternoon...I painted up an example of a "Pigment
Soup" color scheme colorwheel. Ted Goerschner calls
it working with a "mother color"...and a few other artists
putting out books of recent as well, but this was a more
common knowledge in the early 1900's thru mid 1900's
as one of a number of palette strategies to create great
moods, unifying harmonizing pictures.
The way a pigment soup works is you simply mix up a
color pleasing to you...one that by experience will nail
the mood that excites your aesthetic senses, and draw a
piece of that color into of your main palette color piles.
The common color simply pulls everything together.
To illustrate, I mixed up a pile of this somewhat
neutral bluish-green...
I then grabbed a paint panel...sketched out some
colorwheel lines...and painted the center space the
main dominant "soup" color...and immediately
surrounding the dominant are the pure primary
colors of my limited palette, and the secondaries
mixed up from then...
Working our way out now, I take the dominant
bluish-green color and mix a bit into each of
the primaries and secondaries...then finish off
with the tint of the same, or adding white.
Note how the colors naturally and very pleasingly
harmonize on the wheel...and premixed on your
palette gives you full confidence the painting will
all pull together.
I'll conclude this little illustration by mentioning that quite
often the artist that works with a limited palette is very
much limiting himself.
Here's the thing...if you understand just a smidge of
color theory, are connected to some knowledge understood
by the past masters and put that to work, you can use
a simple strategy such as "pigment soup" to expand the
very few colors.
I only use three primaries: Utrecht French Ultramarine Blue,
Cadmium Lemon Yellow, W&N Bright red, Naples Yellow...
sometimes Viridian, and white as my routine palette.
Consider the possibilities...as this was just one color I
indiscriminately mixed up to use as a dominant, so...how
many colors could one mix up and run with? Endless!!!
And...that is just the "pigment soup" strategy. There are
about a half-dozen different strategies I work with, one
common to quite a few plein air painters and painters in
general...mixing on the fly seeing the actual color, and
this is called "optical color" mixing. Others are a neutral
mud block-in wet into wet alla prima method, a twist on
an Edgar Payne strategy I've been developing. And one
more, one of my favorites is the split-complementary
palette...which involves a dominant color, then using its
split-complementaries plus white.
There are more...but what??? We are limiting ourselves
by understanding the maximum that can be done with
with less or fewer colors??? Sssheesh...the few under-
stood open a whole world about color, their very many
possibilities. From my observations I could argue that
having 16-20 colors out on a palette hardly gives the
artist a chance for the complexities to be understood
simply!
That's my story...and I'm stickin' to it!!!
For information on my workshop I'm teaching this weekend
(still time...) click here, contact me!
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