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.

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.