Watercolor Painting: A Comprehensive Approach to Mastering the Medium (23 page)

Look around for an object that is a single complex color—something like an eggplant, or a paper bag, that will require at least a little of all three primaries to match. Mix your primaries together to make the color. When you are satisfied that your mix is as good a match as you can make, put a stroke of it on a piece of paper.

Now choose a different set of primaries and match the same object. Try more sets of primaries and more objects. Make your sample strokes beside each other for comparison.

If one group of primaries will not make a perfect match, get as close as you can and compare your mixed color to the object. Would the color you made serve as a reasonable interpretation of the object? My experience is that it almost always would. If you had chosen to match the back of your hand, for example, a mix of just about any red, yellow, and blue would make a believable flesh tone. It might not be perfect, but it would be perfect enough. How often, really, does a color have to be an exact match?

There are many ways to mix a color. When I’m on an excursion and have only a limited quantity of paints with me, I may run out of some of my favorite colors. Cobalt blue is often the first to go, then quinacridone gold, green gold, carbazole violet, ultramarine, and so on, until I’m left with pthalo blue, hansa yellow, some kind of brown, and whatever the red is that replaced the red I had before that. I may miss my favorites, but as long as I’ve got some version of the primary colors, I can keep painting.

This “close enough” approach to color mixing gives you a solid place to stand—a place from which you can find a path to where you need to be. It boils down to asking:
What do I add to what I’ve got to get what I want?
To know where to go first, I look for the dominant color, as discussed on the following pages.

TOM HOFFMANN,
RANCHO ALTO,
2010
WATERCOLOR ON ARCHES HOT PRESS PAPER
11 × 15 INCHES (28 × 38 CM)

Pthalo blue, new gamboge, and some kind of red I couldn’t identify are not the colors I would normally have chosen for this scene, but they worked just fine when I had run out of everything else.

Mixing a complex
color can be tricky. To narrow down the possibilities, imagine that there are only six color names: red, yellow, blue, green, orange, and violet. When confronted with a color that is difficult, ask yourself:
What is the dominant color?
And then allow yourself to answer with just one of those six choices.

In the scene from a shrub steppe of Eastern Washington, right, the characteristic color of the spring grasses is vibrant but complex. To mix the color, where would you begin? Some people might choose orange. Some would pick red. Others might see green. In any case, this color is not easily reduced to a single hue. Whatever you identify as the dominant color, it is clear that it is just a starting place. A single color might not do justice to the richness of the subject, but to get started, all we need is one.

Once the dominant color is present, what else is needed is easier to gauge. If the main color is too blue, it needs either red or yellow, or some of each. A color that is too red would need blue or yellow, and one that is too yellow would need red or blue. That is the whole story. To test your instincts, take another look at the shrub steppe photo. If you had already mixed a color for the foreground grasses, what would you reach for to change it to the color of the sunlit hills in the background?

Evaluate the subject.
To identify the color in the spring grasses in this
photograph, try squinting. This helps minimize the texture.

Look closely to identify the dominant color.
There seem to be several colors present here. Try to choose just one as a place to begin.

Make a version of the color you choose.
Let’s say you identified orange, as shown here, but when asked the question “What is the dominant color?” you really wanted answer with “orangey-green.” If so, you’ve already moved to the next step.

Add a second color.
Consider what you want to add to move closer to the complexity of the grasses. I chose green. I like the way these two colors, orange and green, can be separate and still work together. But the hue is still missing something. I see more red in the photo detail.

Add a third color, if necessary.
Adding the red without mixing it in completely allows the three component colors to assert themselves the way the different-colored grasses do.

Now try the same process for the shadow color in this picture of the hills in the Yakima Canyon, at right. It may help to isolate the shadow. The colors often seem more apparent out of context. Take care, though, to make sure the value stays close. With the context gone, relative dark and light are difficult to compare.

Evaluate the subject.
Again, to identify the shadow color in this photograph, try squinting.

Isolate the area you want to identify.

EMIL KOSA JR.,
BOAT HAVEN,
1932
WATERCOLOR ON PAPER
17 × 11 INCHES (43 × 28 CM)

To me, this is, above all, a painting of sunlight. With a palette limited to no more than four colors, Kosa has created an interplay of intense warms and cools that vibrate with light. By surrounding the reserved whites with strong blue and yellow passages, the artist efficiently establishes a feeling of the full spectrum of sunlight.