This article is the overview article for Colour and I have subdivided each area into individual posts to make it easier to target information relative to you. If you find this post too long, enter your search term in the search box to find the targeted articles.
The Sublime
Colour communicates so much in painting, the most important element of it is mood or the feeling in the painting. It is not the colour which is important, it is the viewers understanding of the colour which matters so it not as important to understand colour as it is to understand your viewer.
Last Breath Advice
Don’t focus on the perfection of colour. Understand your concept and balance the colour in the whole painting
Other Top Points
Local colour is not to be trusted, colour is relative to it’s context.
Focusing on the accuracy of a particular area of colour is red herring, it is only ever about how the colours relate to each other in a painting
There are 2 colour wheels for the painter to consider: Subtractive and Additive. Additive is how to understand your colour relationships and troubleshoot through the painting. Subtractive is how to understand mixing the pigments on your palette.
A human being sees red, green and blue light waves.
In oil colour there are 3 points where colours mix so it is important not to mix them too much at any of these points: on your palette, on your brush, on the canvas.
Muddy colour doesn’t exist. It is a colour and it only reads as nothing because it is existing without a context.
When mixing colour:
Don’t mix too many colours. Keep it simple: 2 main colours + a seasoning colour
Don’t over mix your colours, let a some streaks of the individual colours remain
Don’t smash your colour with your brush, pick up the paint
Don’t smash your colour into your canvas, let it rest on the surface
Control cross-contamination of colours. Keep wiping your palette knife or your brush before picking up fresh colour to mix. There will always be a certain amount of contamination but you want to control it so that you can predict the outcome.
Keep the main colours on your pallet simple.
Know which are your transparent pigments and which are opaque
Know which are your strong pigments and which are weak.
Remember to allow space for visual colour mixing, give up some control because painting is about your viewer not you.
Always lay out a full palette so that you can easily pick up the colour you need and not break your chain of thought.
Always keep your main colours in the same area on the palette so that reaching for them is instinctual.
Start here
The first concept to remember is that painting is communicating through paint. Decide what you want to communicate and think about who you are communicating to because successful communication is understanding how the being you are communicating to, understands. In this case we are communicating to humans so we need to understand how humans understand communication and what signals they are sensitive to and how they interpret these signals.
Humans perceive colour first with their eye and then their minds.
The human eye has 3 cones to perceive colour: red, green and blue.
