Читать книгу The Duffer’s Guide to Painting Watercolour Landscapes - Don Harrison - Страница 8

USING COLOUR

Used in the right way, colours can create visual excitement or a mood of peaceful tranquillity. They can be garish and strident or restful and harmonious, bold and powerful or incredibly subtle. Colours can make or mar a painting, so they are a crucial part of picture making. But for the new painter, choosing the right colours and understanding how to mix them can be a minefield.

The plethora of books, videos and magazine articles simply adds to the confusion, offering an overwhelming amount of conflicting advice. Some suggest a limited palette, while others promote the use of many hues.

Most people require a simple-to-understand, easy-to-remember system for selecting, mixing and adjusting colours. This chapter provides a logical explanation for choosing particular colours, with some simple mixing techniques to help you arrive at the hue you want quickly and easily.

FISHERMAN AT PARLEY

38 × 56 cm (15 × 22 in)

The autumn trees have shed much of their foliage, but the colours are essentially warm. The pale neutral sky and the cool colours of the distant trees contrast well with the warmer colours in the foreground.

Primary colours

As children, we are taught about colour in simple terms. We are shown how the colours of the rainbow can be formed into a circle to make a colour wheel and told how the primary colours red, yellow and blue cannot be mixed from any other colours. For artists, this basic thoeretical knowledge can help the colour mixing process. Use the order of the colours in the colour wheel as a handy guide for arranging the paints on your palette.

Primary colours – reds, yellows and blues – are so called because they cannot be mixed from other colours. They form the basis for all colour mixing.

Complementary colours

Most of us know what happens when different primary colours are mixed together – red and yellow make orange, blue and yellow give green and red and blue produce violet. By adding the second primary in each case, a secondary colour mix is produced. Logically, if these secondary colours can be mixed from the primaries, there is no need to buy them for your palette.

Each secondary colour, having been mixed from two of the primary colours, is usually referred to as the complementary colour of the other primary. Thus the complementary colour of red is green (a mixture of the other two primaries), the complementary colour of yellow is violet and the complementary colour of blue is orange. So what, I hear you ask? The useful point to remember is that placing complementary colours next to each other makes each of them stand out vividly. On the other hand, mixing all three primary colours together in roughly equal amounts results in dark grey or muddy colours and should be avoided.

Even when you know how to mix these combinations of primary colours, you may still find it difficult to make a particular hue. You would be right in thinking that a few more colours might be useful. But what colours should you choose and in any case why select particular primaries instead of alternative reds, blues or yellows, and what difference will choosing different ones make? Read on!

The standard colour wheel, showing six colours. These are the three primaries – red, yellow and blue – and the three secondary mixes – orange, green and violet.

Warm and cool colours

When we look at colours they have an obvious warm or cool appearance. In fact, we tend to think of violet/blue/green colours as cool and red/orange/yellow colours as warm. This warm or cool look can be used to create a mood or seasonal influence.

If your selected colours include a cool and a warm version of each primary this gives you the flexibility to mix almost any colour you wish. Manufacturers have different names for similar colours, so choose them visually. For example, Lemon Yellow and Aureolin have the greenish yellow appearance of real lemons whereas Cadmium Yellow Deep and Gamboge will both lean towards orange and look like strong custard. Do not buy ready-mixed greens, oranges or violets – these can be mixed from the primaries.

Warm colours	Cool colours

THE VALLEY

34 × 57 cm (13½ × 22½ in)

The warm colours of the foreground grasses and mountains on the right are in stark contrast to the cool blue/green slopes of the other mountains in shadow. Using a juxtaposition of warm and cool colours is an effective way of giving the impression of depth.

Laying out the palette

You may prefer different primaries to the ones I use, but make sure you include warm and cool versions of each and judge their suitability for yourself by eye. My usual primaries are Cadmium Yellow (warm) and Lemon Yellow (cool), Cadmium Red (warm) and Alizarin Crimson (cool), French Ultramarine (warm) and Cobalt Blue (cool). Useful additional colours are Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna and Burnt Umber. These nine colours are sufficient to get you started and you can add to them later if you wish.

If you place your colours on the palette to roughly match the colour wheel, you can find them easily without having to think. I like to arrange the three pairs of warm and cool primaries first, leaving a good thumb’s width between each primary and leaving an equal gap around the perimeter between the pairs. Squeeze out generous helpings of paint– if you use a tiny squirt it will be difficult to load the brush properly.

Once the primaries are in place, the other colours can be slotted in between. I usually place Burnt Umber to the right of the Alizarin Crimson. This mixes with the neighbouring French Ultramarine to produce a good dark blue/grey close to black, so there is no need to buy black paint. Raw Sienna and Burnt Sienna are both useful earth colours and can be placed between Cadmium Yellow and Cadmium Red because they are both on the warm side of yellow.

Keeping colours fresh

Watercolour is a transparent medium, so white paint is not mixed with it to make it lighter. Instead, the paint is diluted with clean water to make it paler and for white areas the paper is left unpainted. So you do not need white paint.

When your blobs of paint run low, top them up with fresh paint. If the paint blobs dry out or become muddied, freshen them up with a little clean water under the tap. I usually tape or clip a second palette over mine and this keeps the palette free of dust and dirt.

Position the three pairs of primaries first, spacing them equally around the edge. Clockwise, the colours here are Lemon Yellow, Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Red, Alizarin Crimson, French Ultramarine and Cobalt Blue.

Placing the colours in set positions will make selecting the right colour easier. Here I have placed Raw Sienna and Burnt Sienna between the yellows and reds and Burnt Umber between Crimson and French Ultramarine.

Basic colour mixing

When beginners mix colours in a conventional palette, they usually use huge amounts of water and touch small dabs of colour into it. Not only is this wasteful, but the mixture is bound to look weak and watery. The great advantage of using a large round palette is the ample mixing area that is left in the centre. However, because there is no restraining lip between this area and the colours, you need to use less water. By pulling colours across the centre of the palette in bands – overlapping in places, keeping them separate in others – you have a choice of colours plus extra ones where they blend together and you avoid the inevitability of having a central pool of watery colour. This method also discourages you from making weak mixtures and helps you avoid insipid or muddy colours. It allows you to use stronger paint mixes, giving you more control.

When you mix colours always start by damping the brush, then pulling a little water into the centre of the palette and blending in the lighter colour first. The colours are pulled across the palette in bands. Here, Cadmium Red has been pulled into Lemon Yellow to produce orange – no surprise here. If it is too yellow more red can be added, and if it is too red more yellow can be added. If it is too dark a touch more water can be added, and if it is too weak more of each colour can be added. It is useful to practise these simple mixes.

Try some simple combinations with three primary colours to get used to mixing colours on a round palette. Each time, start with the lighter of the two colours and then add the darker. This way you will use less paint.

Cadmium Yellow is pulled into a little clean water, then Cobalt Blue added to make green. Of course, this is not the only green possible. By adding more of one primary than the other or adding more or less water, many shades of green can be produced just from these two colours alone. This saves buying ready-mixed greens.

Here, Cobalt Blue has been pulled into Alizarin Crimson to make violet or purple. Mixing a different blue primary into a different red primary will produce an alternative shade of violet. Experiment with your colours.

Mixing vibrant colours

There are many instances where you need pure, vivid colours and to do this we use adjacent primaries. When you mix two primaries together that are nearest to each other on the colour wheel, the result is a very intense secondary colour. Alizarin Crimson is more blue in appearance than Cadmium Red and has a leaning towards violet. French Ultramarine also leans towards violet, unlike the cooler blues, so with this affinity they make a clean-looking violet colour when mixed together.

Lemon Yellow, which is cool and greenish looking, when mixed with Cobalt Blue, produces a clear fresh green, ideal for spring foliage. Coeruleum, a very cool greenish blue, would work even better, but as this is a very powerful staining colour that is hard to lift out it is best avoided by beginners. Cadmium Red, with a leaning towards orange, mixed with the warmer of the yellows, Cadmium Yellow, produces a rich and vibrant orange. The positioning of the pairs of warm and cool primaries on the palette makes selection of these vibrant mixes simple.

Mixing adjacent primaries produces the most vibrant secondary colours.

BOARD SAILING

15 × 13 cm (6 × 5 in)

Using pairs of adjacent primaries mixed together results in the essential vivid colours needed to portray the sails. The strong green colours of the background trees make the sails stand out even more.

Avoiding muddy colours

If you add three primaries together in roughly equal quantities the result is grey or ‘mud’ and this can happen very easily without you being aware of it.

For example, you may have mixed yellow and red and finished using the orange that resulted. If some of the remnants of this are inadvertently left on the palette (or you have not cleaned your brush properly) you will find when you mix the red with blue to make a pleasant violet, for instance, that the result is often very drab. The reason is that some of the previous mixture blends with the new mixture. As the orange residue contains yellow, when added to your two new colours, red and blue, the result is a blend of all three primaries again. So, to avoid this, clean the mixing area often or keep different colour mixes on separate sides of the palette and clean your brushes properly in between mixes.

Neutralizing colours

Just as vibrant hues can be mixed from two adjacent primaries, so a neutral hue can be produced from mixing two primary colours that are not adjacent on the colour wheel. In fact, the further apart they are, the more neutral or dull they become because the colours ‘lean’ in the wrong direction.

Mixing just two primaries together is slightly limiting and may not produce the subtle hue you need, so what about mixing three together to produce neutral tints? This seems to contradict the advice I have just given you: it is true that mixing equal amounts of the three primary colours produces a very dull grey or muddy mixture. The important point is to add just a tiny amount of the third primary to produce a neutral hue. To tone down a single primary, just add tiny amounts of the other two primaries.

The beauty of arranging your colours on a round palette to match the colour wheel is that complementary colours, whether mixtures or individual colours, are always roughly opposite each other, so you know where they are without having to think about it.