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ENHANCE YOUR COLOURS

How can I use colour to give vitality to a subject and make it appear almost more real than it is?

Answered by:

Paul Riley

When painting it is natural to regard colour as like for like. By this I mean that we tend to see the view before us as a kind of photograph where the colour is local, sometimes given vibrancy by the sun. However, when it is painted as such the result often looks disappointing, drab and dull, rather like an instant photograph. The reason for this is that the colour is not exaggerated enough.

HEIGHTENING COLOUR

It helps to remind yourself that you are compressing nature into a smaller format. The vast landscape, for example, is to be reduced and distilled to fit onto a piece of paper or canvas in such a way as to indicate the intensity of the sun’s effect on foliage, water, flowers or flesh.

Autumn Tree 1

29 × 39 cm (11¹/₂ × 15¹/₄ in)

This was painted in primaries and secondaries using only the six colours described in the text. They were applied in various ways from stripes to dots and merging soft edges.

This approach applies, I believe, to all media on all surfaces. Thus, when thinking about how to represent a blank white wall it is necessary to see all the subtle nuances of colours that are present in it in order to make it appear real.

For example, the blue of daylight from an adjacent window will merge into violet where the white of the wall picks up the red-orange electric light. This, in turn, can cause yellow casts, which can then be tinted again by light bouncing from the floor covering, whatever that may be. All this is apart from any surface blemishes on the wall that can add further colour variations.

When seeing these variations a painter needs to heighten them to make the subject appear almost more real than it is. The same, for example, applies to shadows that are not necessarily the grey drab areas that they seem. Look deeply and you will see that they reveal colours more vibrant than their illuminated counterparts.

Autumn Tree 2

29 × 39 cm (11¹/₂ × 15¹/₄ in)

I repainted Autumn Tree 1 using the complementary colours. This resulted in some exciting surprises – blue tree, orange sky, red fields!

COLOUR MECHANICS

To understand how to apply colour you need to know how it works. In transparent media like watercolour, inks and transparent acrylics there are two issues to consider: chromatics, and pigment behaviour. In opaque media pigment behaviour is not critical. Chromatics affects all media, and may be divided into hue and tone. Hue refers to the colour of something, tone to the lightness or darkness, within a particular hue. A hue – primary, secondary or tertiary – is specific.

Let us look at the primary colours. The first point to note is that the colour manufacturer cannot make an absolute primary. Red, for example, will invariably be tainted by the other two primaries: blue and yellow. Yellow and blue are also similarly affected – yellow by red and blue; blue by red and yellow.

Understanding this radically affects secondary colour mixing. Examples of these primary types are as follows:

1)	yellow red	=	Cadium Red
	blue red	=	Permanent Rose (quinacridone)
2)	red yellow	=	Cadmium Yellow
	blue yellow	=	Lemon Yellow
3)	red blue	=	French Ultramarine
	yellow blue	=	Phthalo Blue

Therefore to mix true secondaries from these primaries you should use the following colours:

1)	Green:	mix a blue yellow – Lemon Yellow – and a yellow blue – Phthalo Blue.
2)	Orange:	mix a yellow red – Cadmium Red – and a red yellow – Cadmium Yellow.
3)	Violet:	mix a red blue – French Ultramarine and a blue red – Permanent Rose.

Any other mixes from these colours will produce a tertiary colour, which is perfectly acceptable but must be understood as such. For example, mixing Cadmium Yellow with French Ultramarine is the equivalent of mixing yellow, blue and a proportion of red. Producing tertiaries like this is a way of neutralizing a colour.

Primaries

(left to right): Lemon Yellow (yellow and blue); Cadmium Yellow (yellow and red); Permanent Rose (red and blue); Cadmium Red (red and yellow); Phthalo Blue (blue and yellow); French Ultramarine (blue and red).

True secondaries

(left to right): Lemon Yellow and Phthalo Blue; Cadmium Yellow and Cadmium Red; Permanent Rose and French Ultramarine.

Tertiary secondaries

(left to right): Cadmium Yellow and French Ultramarine; Lemon Yellow and Permanent Rose; Cadmium Red and Phthalo Blue.

Tertiaries break down into three groups: red biased (more red than yellow or blue), which are termed browns; yellow biased, which are beiges; and blue biased, which are greys.

COMPLEMENTARY COLOURS

So far I have talked about hues in isolation. However, when they are put adjacent to one another various things occur that affect the eye, which, in transmitting the information, can excite the brain. The complementary colours of red and green, blue and orange, yellow and violet, when seen in close conjunction, excite the brain because although the eye sees two colours – for example red and green – it is, in fact, aware of three: red, yellow and blue.

The artist can use these conjunctions to draw the viewer’s eye to specific parts of a painting or to enhance a particular colour. When the principle is applied to neutral colours you are able to pull forward primaries or secondaries in painting. For example, a red will come forward in a painting if the colour surrounding it is a green grey.

Autumn Tree 3

29 × 39 cm (11¹/₂ × 15¹/₄ in)

Finally, I painted the subject using all neutral colours: browns, greys, beiges, which were mixed using the primaries. The near blacks, for example, were obtained by mixing Trench Ultramarine with Phthalo Blue.

COLOUR SCHEMING

In order to stimulate a way of seeing a subject you need a scheme or method to counteract the obvious. One way I do this is to break down the colour zones in front of me into primaries and secondaries in their various tones, cutting out all tertiaries. So, for example, greys will be either blue or violet; browns, red or orange; beiges will become yellow or orange. I then produce a colour sketch based on this to see how powerful the effect will be.

Subsequently I will produce another study where I will replace all the colours with their complementaries: so greens will become red; violets will become yellow; and oranges will become blue; and so on. This will produce quite startling combinations with red trees, orange skies and yellow shadows!

To complete the process I then produce a sketch that employs the best of both worlds. I find that the colour choice is purely subjective and can have many variations. In a painting where boldness is the criterion this method helps to release inhibitions about local colour and enables the painter to adapt colour to his or her choice.

VIBRANT NEUTRALS

On the basis of the previous exercise I like to look at how I can make my neutrals sing to a similar tune. The way to do that is to think carefully about their mixture. Greys can vary from blue to green to violet, and depending on which colours they are to complement will vary accordingly. Green grey to red, violet grey to yellow, blue grey to orange are some of the options.

Devon Village

57 × 76 cm (22¹/₂ × 30 in)

When painting a vista like this the likelihood is that the whole picture could look oppressively green. To counteract this you need to search for every other colour possible, hence the violet, blue and gold trees, and yellow fields, with blue and mauve skies. All the neutral colours have been enhanced by making them positively complementary to their adjoining colours.

Browns do not have to be ‘mud’ if seen in this context. By varying the amount of red, yellow or blue, to complement the colour it is adjacent to, you can enhance the quality of your browns an immeasurable amount.

When mixing any of these colours it is as well to bear in mind that the increments to change the colour may be very small, so colour testing on an adjacent piece of paper will help to avoid disappointment. Be brave, be bold!

Plums and Roses

47 × 57 cm (18¹/₂ × 22¹/₂ in)

I tried to obtain the strength of colour in this painting by contrasting the deep-toned primaries with pale secondaries and even paler neutrals. The greys were all mixed to complement the vibrancy of the yellows, so where the yellows tended towards orange the greys were bluer, but where the yellows were more green the greys had more red in them. This is not a hard and fast rule, but it pays to think about it.

Coombe Courtyard

57 × 76 cm (22¹/₂ × 30 in)

The strength of colour in the painting is due to the preponderance of primary and secondary colours, which have been used unadulterated by mixing on the paper rather than in a palette. One other way of ensuring the clarity of the colour is to employ the white line technique to ensure that passages of colour do not overlap and thereby cause unnecessary tertiary mergings.