Watercolor Painting for Dummies (25 page)
Read Watercolor Painting for Dummies Online
Authors: Colette Pitcher
Tags: #Art, #Techniques, #Watercolor Painting, #General
Make your own color wheel. Follow Steps 1 to 3 to draw your own color wheel or copy Figure 5-1 on cardstock and continue with Step 4. Use the colors you own to fill in the color wheel. You need to buy the primary colors, but you can mix your own secondary and tertiary colors, which I call
luxury colors.
Luxuries make life easier. The purchased “luxury” colors are more intense, but the mixed versions of secondary and tertiary colors create a unity in your painting (more on unity in Chapter 6).
1.
Draw a circle with a pencil on a piece of watercolor paper.
Trace around a plate or something round. You choose the size you want.
2.
Using a straight edge, make two triangles inside the circle.
Make the first triangle’s points touch the circle with the bottom leg horizontal, and try to make all three sides equal in length — an equilateral triangle.
Make another triangle upside down so the points fall on the circle between the points of the first triangle.
3.
Label the first triangle’s points with the primary color names — red, yellow, and blue.
It doesn’t matter which point gets which color, but it may be easiest to follow Figure 5-1.
Divide the triangles whose tips point to the primary colors by drawing a straight line from the point to the middle of the triangle leg on the opposite side of the wheel.
4.
Paint each primary color where named.
Apply a little water to the paint (if you haven’t set up your palette yet, refer to Chapter 2). Mix enough pigment with water to get a rich color in the mixing area of your palette. Fill in the whole little triangle with the color that corresponds to the label name. Use a round brush and practice making a graded wash in the little triangle. Let the paint be darker near the outside edge of the triangle, but keep it transparent enough to read the name of the color through it. (Chapter 3 has more on graded washes.) Adding more water makes the paint lighter; less water makes the paint darker.
Follow the model in Figure 5-1. You now have a primary color wheel.
5.
Mix secondary colors next.
If you have tubes of paint that are secondary colors, skip to Step 6. To mix primary colors to get secondary colors, follow these steps:
A. Add water to two primary colors and mix a little puddle of each color on your palette leaving an inch or two between. Rinse your brush between using each color so you don’t contaminate your pure pigment puddles.
B. Rinse your brush again, then bring a little of each of the two colors together in the middle.
Equal amounts of primary color should produce a nice secondary color, but sometimes one primary is more potent.
You can adjust the color by adding more of one or the other primary. By gradually mixing the colors, you get a variety of color choices as opposed to mixing both whole puddles together and having only that one color. Don’t be afraid to experiment. Play. Label. Discover.
Write down the names of your mixed colors and their recipes or formulas. After you add your secondary colors to your color wheel, you can refer back to it to remember how a color was made.
If you have tubes of paint in secondary colors, compare the color you mix and the tube color. Which one do you prefer?
6.
Fill in the points of the second triangle you drew with the secondary colors. Make sure to put the colors between the correct primary colors.
Use the mixtures from Step 5 or pure paint pigments that correspond with the secondary color names.
“You look so nice today” is a nice compliment. Opposite colors on the color wheel are
complementary
(notice that the two words are spelled differently), which means they also look nice together and can help neutralize each other.
A
complementary color
of a primary color is the secondary color opposite it on the color wheel (take a look back at Figure 5-1). They look nice together; maybe that’s why they’re complementary. Tertiary colors can also be complementary — any colors opposite each other on the wheel are complementary colors.
You can use analogies to remember complementary combinations. For instance:
Orange and blue
are the colors of sunsets. Living in Colorado, I remember the colors of the Denver Broncos football team.
Yellow and purple
are the colors of spring and Easter eggs.
Red and green
are Christmas colors.
Make a chart of complementary colors.
1.
Draw a 4-x-1-inch rectangle on watercolor paper using a pencil.
2.
Use a 1-inch flat brush to paint clear water in the rectangle area so the area is damp — no puddles, no dry areas, just a shiny, even, wet surface.
3.
Paint ultramarine blue on one short side of the rectangle, rinse your brush, then paint burnt sienna on the other end. Blue and orange are complementary.
Burnt sienna is a red-orange-brown color. You can use any complementary combination you want.
4.
Before the clear water dries, brush the two colors toward the middle of the rectangle to make a smooth transition between the two. Let the colors mix in the middle.
The middle should mix to gray if the colors are diluted with water, or the mixed colors should be nearly black if you’re using thicker colors with less water in them. You may even want to try mixing colors using more or less water to see the variety of new colors you can discover.
5.
Label the colors you used with a pencil.
6.
Repeat these steps with other complementary colors and label your choices.
Try mixing black and yellow. These two colors usually turn green because black has a lot of blue in it.
Make a chart of as many greens as you can figure out to mix, using whatever blues and yellows you have. Write down the names of the colors you use so you can remember your formulas when you want to create these colors again. Now observe a landscape in the summer. How many greens are in nature? It’s probably infinite. Now you are aware and really seeing that landscape. Marvelous!
Practice making a gradual change from one color to the other. (If you have trouble controlling the water, remember to blot excess water in your brush on a sponge after rinsing it in clean water. Refer to Chapter 3.)
When you mix complementary colors together, they make a
neutral gray.
After you make several complementary color bars, look at all the gray colors you created. Use the chart to remember how to obtain those colors when you need them in a painting. These colorful grays are more lively than straight-out-of-the-tube grays.
You can make a color less intense, tone it down some, or
neutralize
it by adding a little of the color’s complement. Neutralizing the color makes it look a little more natural. For example, green paint right out of the tube is usually too bright. Landscapes look more natural when you calm down a bright green by mixing in a little red (the complement of green). You can mix hundreds of wonderful greens this way.
Even though yellow and blue make green, if you mix equal parts of yellow, blue, and green’s complement, red, you get gray. So first mix yellow and blue to get a green you like. Then add a small amount of red if the green is too bright or intense. Experiment with the different reds you have.
Other colors can need a bit of neutralizing too. Say you’re painting a drizzling English sky. Bright clear blue just isn’t working. Add a bit of blue’s complement, an orange like burnt sienna, to knock down or neutralize the color and make the sky grayer.
You can neutralize any color by adding a bit of its opposite or complementary color.
