Watercolor Painting: A Comprehensive Approach to Mastering the Medium (22 page)

Looking objectively at your paintings will reveal what your habits are regarding
color. Start by standing back from a dozen paintings, more or less, to see if there are any noticeable tendencies. Are you generous or conservative in the number of colors you use? Do you make deliberate decisions about how colors are distributed on the page? Are you thinking about color temperature and relative intensity? Are your darkest darks all the same color? And most important of all: Do you always make the same color choices, no matter how your purpose changes?

Begin your assessment by identifying the feelings you were after in several paintings. Do the color choices you made support your intention? How might you have enhanced the emotion? Would using more colors, or fewer, strengthen the feeling you sought?

Too many factors are at work to hope to catalog the effects of every color on the emotional content of a picture. It is hard enough to remember which ones stain. Rather than compiling a list of rules (never use green in the sky, placing a red object near the center stabilizes the image, pink with green sells paintings, and so forth), I recommend developing a solid instinct, based on the experience that comes from focused awareness. This can be an uncertain activity at first. It involves letting go of your support system of experts and rules. But it is deeply satisfying to discover that you can ride without the training wheels.

Experience comes from outside ourselves and accumulates inside, but understanding always comes from within. Instead of asking the authorities your question, first try asking yourself. For example, if you are after a feeling of serenity in your painting, should you introduce a new color for this next passage, or refer back to one you have already established? Or, when you are trying to mix a good gray and it keeps coming out brown, what color should you add? You have a lifetime of color experience. If you ask the questions, you will know the answers.

TOM HOFFMANN,
THE FORMER WORLD,
2010
WATERCOLOR ON ARCHES HOT PRESS PAPER
13 × 16 INCHES (33 × 41 CM)

Once this image began to take shape I saw it as land just coming into being. I wanted the raw quality of separate elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Intense colors seemed right, with warm and cool colliding and just beginning to merge.

The computer allows me to see how the painting would have looked If I had used a more integrated palette. By turning up the sepia everywhere, the warm and cool are brought closer together. The color change replaces the feeling of newness with a sense of equilibrium and resolution.

How many
colors do I need?
When we ask this question we walk a fine line between fact and opinion. I have definite preferences when it comes to the number of different colors a painting can carry, but I hesitate to come between you and your taste. When it comes to color, even after forty years of watercolor practice I am only qualified to tell you what
I
like.

Having said this, I will risk adding that I rarely feel that a painting suffers from using too few colors, but I often think there are too many. When you assess your color choices to see if they are appropriate to your purpose, take a good look at how many colors you include. To me it seems unlikely that the number of colors you choose would have
no
effect on the mood of a painting, so if you always use lots of different colors regardless of the feeling you intend, consider putting some limits on your palette.

A traditional limited palette is composed of a red, a yellow, and a blue. With the three primaries, you theoretically have the potential to mix a full spectrum. Paint is not the same as light, though, and even the purest primary paints will not combine to make perfect secondary and tertiary colors. The spectrum that results from the particular primary colors you select will be limited by the combinations those primaries can make. Sargent, for example, often used ultramarine for his blue, burnt sienna for his red, and yellow ocher for his yellow. The green that results from a mixture of ultramarine and yellow ocher is more of an olive than an emerald, since both parent colors contain a bit of red. Similarly, the best violet we can make from ultramarine and burnt sienna is a bluish brown. Artists have always capitalized on this limitation, using the restricted range of three component colors as a source of harmony in their paintings. If we can adjust our expectations and imagine that we are describing a world where these mixtures are the true green and violet, an overall feeling of cohesiveness will come from every color being related to all the others.

A limited palette is an effective way to achieve an overall unity on the page, but it frequently sets a minor key mood. A diverse palette makes a cheerful, lively surface, but it can leave the viewer no place to rest. Be sure to assess the effect the range of colors you have chosen has on the feeling of the piece.

STANISLAW ZOLADZ,
LOFOTEN,
2008
WATERCOLOR ON PAPER
29⅞ × 41⅜ INCHES (76 × 105 CM)

In a painting that depicts vast space and several landforms, the artist has made masterful use of a limited palette, employing it to unify the image and make the illusion of space convincing. Shifting the dominance of warm ocher to cool blue emphasizes the division between foreground and background, and keeps the mountains feeling distant.

The two Michael Reardon paintings shown here have several qualities in common. Both use hard-edged shapes and accuracy of value to depict a convincing sense of light. The mood of each is quite different, though. One is remote, dignified, and austere, while the other is accessible, boisterous, and playful. This change in mood is partly due to the viewpoint—the palace looks fully half a day’s journey away, whereas we could walk right up to those dragons—but most of the differences come from the palette.

It looks as if one could make all of the subtle colors in
Leh Palace
by mixing a single red, yellow, and blue. The sunlit areas use only the red and yellow, the shadows mostly blue.
Wat Phra Sing,
on the other hand, involves saturated colors, and plenty of them. Even the “white” figures are actually multicolored. One speaks of restraint, the other of exuberance. Both succeed beautifully.

MICHAEL REARDON,
LEH PALACE,
2010
WATERCOLOR ON PAPER
22 × 11 INCHES (56 × 28 CM)

A limited palette suits the austerity of the subject. Even in their purest form, the red, yellow, and blue are diluted.

MICHAEL REARDON,
WAT PHRA SING,
2000
WATERCOLOR ON PAPER
7 × 5 INCHES (18 × 13 CM)

A broad palette of saturated color enhances the delight of coming across these happy creatures.

Years back, a couple of students returned from a workshop with a sort of Rolodex of
color samples they had spent the week compiling. Little pieces of watercolor paper were held together on loose-leaf rings, with a color swatch on one side, and the recipe on the other. The idea was to carry it along on plein air excursions, as an aid to color mixing. If you wanted to paint that cactus over there, for example, you would flip through the pages on the ring until you found the closest green, and simply follow the recipe.

To me, this approach is exactly backwards. The recipe book seems designed to make sure you never become confident of your own instincts. Maybe, after using it for a long time, you will actually memorize the recipes and know what to mix just by looking at the subject, but surely there must be a faster route to increased color awareness.

Once again, taking responsibility for your decisions is the first step. Develop confidence in your instincts. Choosing and
mixing colors is a lot like cooking. Some people rely on recipes and never vary them. Others feel free to substitute ingredients, or even improvise completely. As with cooking, color mixing is built upon a foundation of a few principles. Understanding them gives you the freedom to try something unexpected that still works beautifully.

When you see a color you like in another artist’s painting, it is natural to ask, “How did you make that color?” But what you really need to know is the answer to “How did you know what to do to make that color?” The following exercises offer an approach to the task of providing your own answers to the question:
How should I begin to mix this color?

Everything begins with the primaries. Start with a red, a yellow, and a blue that seem to be relatively pure. The blue, for example, would not appear to have much red or much yellow in it. (Cobalt would work. Pthalo would also be fine. Ultramarine has a little too much red, and therefore will not make a pure green.) The red should be neither too orange nor too purple, and the yellow should be neither too green (like aureolin) nor too orange (like new gamboge). The more pure the colors are, the more versatile they will be as mixers. You can test them for intensity by combining them to make secondary colors. The purple, orange, and green that result should be clean versions of those colors.