Questions about studying color from life

[Farvus]

I have a few questions about learning colour beacause it's been bugging me recently and also in the past.

When studying colour from life is it better to:
1. first create limited harmonized palette based on what I see and from what I know in colour theory. Then paint with these colours.
2. or just put down colours as I see them (also as much variation as possible) and try to notice if they work together (or not)

The other thing is when I was in one atelier with painting lessons, there was some thought behind what objects are chosen for still life. For example draperies were in different reds or greens. I guess it was done this way to force thinking about subtle changes in colour like temperature and saturation.
Is something like that recommended for beginning or I can just grab random objects at home and paint them with equal success ? I am so careful with these things beacause after few years I realised that with learning painting it's much more effective to start from simple stuff. Only few basic colours, simple subjects and slowly introducing bigger challanges. I already have some experience but I feel like I missed some complete basics.

I think it all sums up this kind of question - Does colour harmony exists in nature beacuase light from environment binds everything together or I need to create colour harmony myself?

Thanks in advance.

[Farvus]

I didn't actually mean having a bit of blue in every color. It's more about seeing the dominant hues and focusing on them instead of using every possible paint I have. You're right though about screwing color theory beacause when using it for painting from life I would limit myself and avoid happy accidents which are good when learning. I guess I should observe the nature harder .

The photo is great. There is not only cool shadows vs warm light but also complementary colours orange vs blue.

Thanks for explanation.

[sweetoblivion314]

i mainly just use my knowledge of color theory for two things. Setting up the still life and mixing my colors. When your creating a still life you basically have ultimate control so any lack of harmony due to the set up is entirely your fault so its good to know color theory to assist you. As for painting it. When i see a color in my set up i trust my eye. Then i use my knowledge to know what colors to mix to get that color. Its also helpful to know color theory to be able to choose what colors to have available on your pallet. I know some people who always have 10 colors on there pallet cause they dont look at the setup and think about what you can do with each color. Always be thinking about it but never trust it. Trust your instincts and your eye.

[Elwell]

Check out Briggsy's new site.

[TASmith]

"I think you would really have problems with this if you mixed blue in all your colors."

Screw that, there's blue in those oranges, look how muddy they are! I could do it, and it wouldn't necessarily dull down the color. There's a little bit of every color in everything. For that image, you might not need to add blue directly, but possibly add some yellow ochre, which is already muddied up a bit. Or a touch (pinch) of umber, a very bluish brown.

Here's the problem with color. Yes you should trust your eyes.... at first. Then your eyes get tired, and the colors start to glow and change (what happens when you stare at a Rothko for awhile) and you can't see clearly anymore. So, I suggest if you really want exact colors, to do a really quick color sketch, using any paints, and then try and stick with those colors for a longer study, instead focusing on the drawing and textures, etc.

Really, for still lifes I find it much more interesting to pick objects with different textues and refelctions, and see if I can capture them.

EDIT: sweetoblivion has a really good point - don't take any paint out till you see you need it, or it might get wasted. I usually just start out with primaries and white.

[emily g]

It's a good idea for a beginning painter to limit their palette to a few basic colors.
If you squeeze out a bunch of colors you can get overwhelmed with the choices and mix a bunch of things together and then never remember how you mixed something.

I started painting with a limited palette of white, yellow ochre, cadmium red light, and black. If you use the black as a blue, you basically have your primaries there. This taught me more about color theory than anything else because I had to learn to mix everything else myself. Instead of grabbing some green, I had to mix it and learn how to make the green warmer or cooler, etc.

I would start with a simple still life, as you suggested. You can think about the colors in your still life, but the most important thing is to start painting. As you get more advanced and get more confident about painting, then you can start putting more sophisticated thought into setting up your still lifes.

[andymania]

WHOA, Elwell, Briggs' site is awesome

[Elwell]

It sure is. Spread the word.

[Farvus]

sweetoblivion314 wrote exactly what I wanted to know but other posts were helpful too. Thanks everyone.

Elwell - I already knew this website. Haven't seen so much knowledge about colour in one place before .

[andymania]

Hey Farvus,

I saw that your location is in Gdansk, Poland. My mom was born there and my dad was born in Opole.

-Andy

[sweetoblivion314]

It's a good idea for a beginning painter to limit their palette to a few basic colors.
If you squeeze out a bunch of colors you can get overwhelmed with the choices and mix a bunch of things together and then never remember how you mixed something.

I started painting with a limited palette of white, yellow ochre, cadmium red light, and black. If you use the black as a blue, you basically have your primaries there. This taught me more about color theory than anything else because I had to learn to mix everything else myself. Instead of grabbing some green, I had to mix it and learn how to make the green warmer or cooler, etc.

I would start with a simple still life, as you suggested. You can think about the colors in your still life, but the most important thing is to start painting. As you get more advanced and get more confident http://www.conceptart.org/forums/ima...ifedrawing.gif
about painting, then you can start putting more sophisticated thought into setting up your still lifes.

There are some other great things such a limited pallet like this one will do for you.
1) Helps you concern yourself with value over color. Since you dont have bright vibrant yellows and thingsyou can really look and make sure you values are correct.
2) It really helps you understand how one color will affect the eyes intrepretation of the color next to it. This pallet makes it very difficult to get a nice green or blue that will stand on its own. However by abusing color theoy, like mixing some red into the color next to the muddy green you have, the green will actually appear more vibrant and saturated. Orange next to the blue grey you make with Ivory black and white will also make it look much more blue.

keep painting

[Chris Bennett]

Farvus: Option 1 is the best.
J.M.Whistler said: "If you can't organise your palette then how on earth will you organise your painting"

Working with a limited palette gets you half way there simply by default and an extremely limited palette, as emilyG suggests, gets you 3/4 of the way their by default - making some sort of decision about how these are organised on top of this restriction takes you a little further still.

The rest is how you make the paint behave on the canvas.
And this is the bit that catches most of us out: It is a stage that has very little to do with mixing colours and everything to do with an instinctive knowledge, gained by experience, of the endless warm and cool variations produced by placing paint on top of paint from glazes to impasto all in tandem with the way the marks imply the drawing of the form.
This is something that is so complex a process that only the right brain or 'instinctive' faculty can handle it, and colour theory, however sophisticated, is of little or no help at all here in my view.

To end on another quote, this time from Picasso: "Colour?.....let's see.....a bit like seasoning the soup - a pinch more blue, oh and a bit of yellow....no,no, too much.....a little dull crimson perhaps?......Yes, that's just right!"
His best qoute:
"If you don't know what colour to make something...reach for black".

[Farvus]

sweetoblivion314 - I think I know what you mean. I already painted with just basic primary colors + white and it instantly became easier to get under control. Earlier some teachers at my university recommended to use cool and warm version of almost every color and I think it was a bit too much. Especially when painting on big board beacause then you use lots of paint and it all mixes on too small palette producing muddy colors .

Chris Bennett - Great quotes. Thanks! I've read your post several times to make sure if I understand it.
So if I want to paint from life for example something like this - http://travel.3yen.com/wp-content/im...rds_11_014.jpg I try to use mainly different combinations of White, Blue, Red and produce as much variety within these three colors as possible. From vibrant red in the front to bright desaturated purples and blues far away. Then what about those details which are tiny deviation from main colours like strong yellow markings on the bottom left? Is it all about sacrificing these things for the simplicity of painting? Ehh.. I guess I'll just try it out .

[Chris Bennett]

Farvus: It's a question of hierarchy.
Take the picture in the link you posted and just say to yourself: "If I only had five stripes of colour to represent that, what would they be? To do this you would not select any particular colour on the photo but rather put together five colours that somehow summed it up and would at the same time give you the tonal range as well. In this case it might be a deep alizarin, a light turquoisey grey, a warmish darkish brown, a lightened ultramarine blue (mid reddish blue) and a naples yellow.

The moment you do this you have something to play with, and I mean 'play' in the most literal sense as well. Without some kind of framework or rules there is no game.

Thus you are problem solving - making some kind of equivalent for the photo with the means you have given yourself.
You bring the problem deliberately and conciously down to the means at your disposal - as opposed to some vague notion of being able to copy what you see.
It will mean that you are more comfortable with colour because you have some simple elements with which you can work in permutations under your control. You are no longer thinking (and sinking) in a sea of infinite choices.
Having made the choices you start to figure out ways in which they can work together and have a real grip on understanding the processes that you are making yourself.

And when you are done, lo and behold! - you have made a colour statement.

[andymania]

Holy shit my brain is fried after reading that entire Briggs' color theory web site in one sitting........................................... ..........

[Farvus]

Hey Farvus,

I saw that your location is in Gdansk, Poland. My mom was born there and my dad was born in Opole.

-Andy

Nice surprise. This world seems is so small now .

Chris Benett - I think I understand it now. The whole game with observing how it all changes in environment starts from the part when I already have those five stripes of color. Earlier I can choose different palette but these choices will never be perfect beacause nature has infinite number of colors. I can only organize it to represent that one moment or the essence/mood of that place.

I realised now it's all hard to notice while painting with digital media. It's propably necessary to artificially create this framework of rules and you need to know how to do this. Otherwise it's just sea of infinite choices .

Thanks for extensive explanation.

[andymania]

Is this guy trying to rip off Munsell??:

http://www.gamblincolors.com/navigat...ace/index.html

He calls this system "Gamblin Color Space" when in fact he is just regurgitating Munsell's system.

-Andy

[Elwell]

Not so much a rip off as a dumb down. At least they do give (approximate) Munsell notations for their paints elsewhere on the site.

[Chris Bennett]

Farvus: It looks like you've got the hang of it Farvus!
And you are more than welcome - your original question was well put, and it was no trouble taking the time to frame my particular thoughts on the matter for you - and I thank you for taking them seriously. Let me know if you think it helps next time you are working from mother nature!

[andymania]

Gamblin stated that adding white to mineral Viridian will result in a lighter less chromatic green. Then he stated that adding white to Pthaylo green, that the green still retains its brilliance while it lightened in value. Correct me if im wrong, but from what I have learned, doesn't white decrease the chroma of ANY color?

[andymania]

Ahhh.....another question. I decided to do the color charts that Ricahrd Schmid recommended in Alla Prima in order to see what my paints are capable of producing. Now each mixed color was lightened in value with white by 5 steps. My question is, shouldn't there be another seperate set of charts that show the mixed colors darkened in 5 steps of black? What is the purpose of just using mixed colors and their tints?

[Elwell]

Gamblin stated that adding white to mineral Viridian will result in a lighter less chromatic green. Then he stated that adding white to Pthaylo green, that the green still retains its brilliance while it lightened in value. Correct me if im wrong, but from what I have learned, doesn't white decrease the chroma of ANY color?

Briggs actually addresses this on his site. For transparent colors, adding white initially brings up the chroma before it starts to fall off. This is true of both pthalo g. and viridian. But, viridian is both less transparent and less inherently chromatic than pthalo g, so even though it's very close in hue its tints will be grayer.

[andymania]

Elwell,

Check out my other question right after my previous one.

[Craig D]

Nothing like a little gratitude....

[steve kim]

#2.

more specifically:

2. or just put down colours as I see them (also as much variation as possible) and try to notice if they work together (or not)

if you put down the colors you see correctly, then they would 'work together' by default.

its only when your colors are off that things look ugly.

color 'harmonies' or the idea of them 'working together' is some faulty thinking. in terms of observational painting either you get the color right or you don't. if you do, it's good, if you don't, it's ugly.

this is a good starting point for any painter and quite honestly a life's work if you wanted to go that route.

[dose]

I think what others have said is quite valid. I will throw in another interpretation which overlaps some, but is a bit different:

Paint the relationships of the colors in the subject within the range of colors you have.

It has to do with the problem you mentioned- nature has many more colors to work with than are available as artist paints.

There is a word "gamut" from the color matching world which refers to the range of colors that can be produced by a given color system. Nature has the largest gamut (if it can be said to have one). Computer monitors have a certain gamut that is defined by their particular RGB components which is considerably smaller than nature's. When painting with artists' pigments, you have an even smaller gamut that is dependent on the pigments you've chosen to include on your palette.

The question is how to translate between gamuts. If you see a color in nature that can't be reproduced exactly with your paints or on your monitor, what do you do? There are a variety of approaches to deal with this problem.

The way I learned for painting is that you shouldn't try to match the color of an object as you see it, but that you should try to capture the relationships of the colors between the different objects in your subject. As such every color in your painting may need to shift a bit to create the proper relationships. This takes some getting used to, because on your palette or in the color picker you could swear that the color of the watermelon is blue, but when it's in the picture and relative to everything else it looks right because it's bluer than the apple but greener than the sky.

There are other approaches, but I unfortunately don't understand them well enough to talk about them in any detail.

Hope this helps

[steve kim]

sounds like relative colormetric vs perceptual rendering when printing in photoshop .

with pigments there will always be issues of 'gamut'. this can be alleviated somewhat by using inherently saturated, well tinting colors.

the other thing is that unless you are painting light sources, bright illumination from very colorful lights, etc, most natural colors will fall within the gamut of your pigments. for the ones that don't, getting close enough and understanding what sacrifices/trade-offs you are making is a big part of the learning process.

i'm a big advocate of really understanding what you are seeing. all the interpretation/tweaking of relationships/ruminating over color theory will do no good in my opinion if you can't recognize whats happening before your eyes.

as a novice, 99% of the work should be happening between your eyes, your palette, and the canvas

[dose]

I might be derailing this thread, but maybe it's useful discussion. Apologies to Farvus if it's not useful.

sounds like relative colormetric vs perceptual rendering when printing in photoshop .

Exactly the metaphor I think of as well! I spent a bunch of years scanning and printing art for artists' portfolios.

the other thing is that unless you are painting light sources, bright illumination from very colorful lights, etc, most natural colors will fall within the gamut of your pigments.

Hmm. I will have to think about this one. My understanding is quite a large range of colors fall outside the gamut of paints, even just for local color. We are lacking a true cyan and magenta pigment primary, after all. I think it's also complicated further when you take into account the range that is created by light & shadow- then the gamut of pigments is far too small. I also thought there is a problem with not having high enough chroma dark pigments to accurately represent shadow areas- I can't remember doing a painting without having to shift the shadow areas at least slightly. But I could be wrong about on all three accounts- especially the third, which may be mostly due to the particular painting technique I use most often. Will have to do some thinking.

for the ones that don't, getting close enough and understanding what sacrifices/trade-offs you are making is a big part of the learning process.

Yes.

i'm a big advocate of really understanding what you are seeing. all the interpretation/tweaking of relationships/ruminating over color theory will do no good in my opinion if you can't recognize whats happening before your eyes.

I agree with this. Ruminating is bad. But I think the idea of "just paint and it will come to you" is not ideal as well. I don't think this is what you're advocating at all, but I do think it's the other side of the pendulum to over-thinking and over-analyzing and one that people can get stuck in just as much. "Awareness" is a good goal. Good to be aware of the theory while you're working, but not necessarily letting it call the shots. Mostly your awareness should be on you, your materials, and the subject, but leaving out the theory completely and totally can be detrimental. However theory's best place is in interpreting the experience you had afterwards such that you don't make the same mistakes over and over or lose newfound understanding. It should be constantly fluid and flexible to your actual experience. We might be saying the same thing.

Part of what makes the process of painting the relationships seem difficult is prior learning- we tend to think of things as separate objects with local colors, which you mix up and apply like you would to a wall in one shot. If you think in this way, painting the relationships is a chore because you have to stop and think, "Ok, this orange is a bit lighter than the one I just painted, so I'll have to shift it a little bit towards yellow to make it work, so I better mix up a big batch of orange-yellow." Ugh. But if instead the painting is brought up as a whole in a more iterative fashion, you are always just constantly adjusting color fields. Here it's too yellow, over here isn't orange enough in comparison, here is too dark, wait now it's too blue after I lightened it, etc etc. Eventually some of the fields become an "orange". You make bigger steps of variation in the beginning (you could even count the white of the canvas in the equation), and smaller and smaller steps as you go on. As I've said before- this is only one method of painting though, and I'm not bringing it up to be contradictory, merely to bring another viewpoint to the table.

as a novice, 99% of the work should be happening between your eyes, your palette, and the canvas

Yes, but without some intelligent awareness of what's going on you can waste a lot of time. I think actually we might be on the same page about this, though- when you're starting it out it can all be too overwhelming. It's often best to just get in there, and start making some sense of it later. But- always be aware!

p.s. Love your work. And great discussion.

[Chris Bennett]

dose: You are not derailing thread at all! What you are saying is very well thought out and deals with the complexities of the issue extemely well.