Tuesday, November 22, 2016

My Jack London Color Palette

While I have no intention of going feral or becoming the leader of a dog sled team, I do, however, get The Call of the Wild occasionally, a periodic signal that it’s time to shake things up. My personal solution is the split-complementary color scheme.

Split Complementary: pick a base color, say red, then go to it’s complement green but instead of green “split" left and right of green on the color wheel to blue green and yellow green. There are twelve different color schemes to pick from as you work your way around a full color wheel of primary, secondary and tertiary colors.

I knocked out the following examples to give you the range of palettes that a three color, split complementary (plus white) color scheme can achieve.

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Breaking the Color Addiction


If you have ever wondered why you’re packing a dozen or more tubes of colors each time you go out plein air painting, consider just bringing these four tubes of color.

Yup, I like Gamblin paints but your brand will work just fine.

I used to have a hard time leaving any of my colors at home, it didn’t take long to discover that that insecurity was a total waste of my time and paint. Eventually it became clear that all I needed was a tube of cadmium yellow medium, cadmium red medium, phthalo blue and titanium white. 

It wasn’t easy to leave all my other colors behind but after all, color precision is more a studio painting thing. Out in the field I don’t want to waste a lot of time setting up my palette or crowding my palette with a lot of different colors. A strong red, yellow, blue and white is all I need.

Here's a bunch of color possibilities that I mixed up using different combinations of cadmium yellow medium, cadmium red medium, phthalo blue and titanium white. Really nice grays, umbers, siennas, viridian though olive greens, warm and cool blues and violet.




Sunday, February 7, 2016

Leave Your Fussy in the Studio


In the field, with limited painting time, I deconstruct all prominent shapes into three value-colors. A tree shape for instance will have a background (dark interior color), middle ground (general local color) and foreground (sun catching highlight color). These three value-colors are individually mixed on my palette and not gradated by adding either white or black. 

The values of these colors might be very close to each other (low contrast) in overcast, cloudy, foggy, sundown lighting or far apart (high contrast) in bright sunlight. The color of each value is based on temperature (warm or cool). Tree shapes in the background will be cooler because there’s more atmosphere between you and it as apposed to a tree right in front of you. With any one tree the sunny side will be warmer than the shady side.