Color Saturation

(Note: this is a continuation of the book I'm writing with the working title, Art Basics Workbook. It's for students at workshops who feel that they are being held back by a lack of understanding of the basics. This is copyrighted material.)

I asserted earlier in this book that burnt sienna was simply a de-saturated orange. You can prove this for yourself. Put some burnt sienna on a piece of canvas. Next to it, mix orange with a very little bit of ultramarine blue. You should be able to come up with a very acceptable mixture that resembles the burnt sienna. Understanding color saturation is important. if you work with just the fully saturated hues, straight from the tube, without any neutrals (de-saturated colors), your canvas will become a sort of battleground. This is ok if it’s the point you want to make (your message.) But judicious use of neutral colors with a few highly saturated colors (as accents) helps the viewer get “into” the painting.

As an example, when I was younger, I did a self-portrait without painting the background while I worked. I put the background in when I was satisfied with the portrait, and I used bright colors. The portrait, which has been looking pretty good to me up to that point, suddenly looked dull and sunken. What happened? The colors in the face were less saturated than those in the background and thus the background jumped forward. (This has to do with “depth” cues, which will be discussed further in the chapter on depth.)

If you notice, traditional portraits (by Rembrandt, for example) usually darken the background around the face. Far from making the portrait somber, the tones of the face suddenly leap out at you and look vibrant and alive!

Exercise:
On an exercise page or two, do many forms shaped like a lemon in bold yellow. Then, do many forms shaped like a lemon but in a dulled-down yellow (use purple to dull.) Allow it to dry. With a clean brush, try different background colors around each of the lemons. Notice the effect on the lemon. (Note: the value of the background color will also play a part in how vibrant the yellow looks so you must take that into account.) Write in your journal what you observe.

Color Value

Color has value and it is useful to be very conscious of this.

Each color has a native value at its full intensity. You can lighten and darken the value by adding white and black. However, you run into a problem with this. White and black dull a color. There are two ways to lighten a color: using white or using an analogous color. Yellow, which is lighter than orange or red, will lighten them. Yellow will also lighten green. If you can’t use yellow (a high-key color), you can use a procedure called glazing to correct a color that has been lightened (and dulled) by the addition of white.

Glazing will be discussed later. It fell out of use in the impressionist era but I believe it is very useful. There are “off-the-shelf” glazing mediums that you can buy, such as Liquin (from Winsor Newton), a fast-drying medium, for oils or matte medium for acrylics. Generally, with oils, your only restriction is that you must allow enough drying time before glazing.

You can use some darker colors that are analogous to darken the native hue of a color. For instance, Alizarin Crimson will darken Cadmium Red without losing the redness of it.

Shadows:

To familiarize yourself with the basic value of the colors on your palette and improve your understanding of how to lighten and darken them, I recommend the following exercise.

Exercise:
Do a value scale (from white to black) across the top of your page or canvas. Take each of the colors on your palette and, on separate rows under the black and white value scale, place the fully saturated color (generally the color as it comes out of the tube) at the correct point on the value scale. (For instance, even a full hue of yellow would fall towards the white end of the scale, while blue will fit towards the black end of the scale.) Then, for each color, work back and forth on the value scale, towards white by adding white or an analogous color, and towards black by adding the complement of the color you are exploring. As a final check, take a black and white photo or take the completed exercise to a copying machine and make a copy in black and white.

Hue: Part II

It’s useful, in understanding how to mix color, to start off with a limited palette and gradually increase the number of colors. Better that than buying every color “off the shelf,” a very expensive proposition.

The primary color wheel is composed of red, yellow and blue. The question is, which red, yellow and blue. Whether you are just starting out as a painter or whether you’ve been painting for years, I recommend you start out by making a color wheel using only three colors. The paint supply company Daniel Smith has a set of colors they feel represent the “primary hues,” consisting of Cadmium Yellow Light Hue, Pyrrol Scarlet , Permanent Blue and Titanium White. I have not checked this out yet. They also have Primary Cyan, Primary Magenta and Primary Yellow in their Golden Heavy-bodied acrylics. You might try these, or simply restrict yourself to a red, yellow and blue from your basic kit for this exercise. (I would recommend cadmium yellow, cadmium red and ultramarine blue.)


Exercise:
Draw a double circle and divide it into 6 segments like a pie. I suggest that you use only Cadmium (or Hansa) Yellow Medium, Cadmium Red, and Ultramarine Blue. Make a triangle between three of the portions. Fill one slice with yellow, one with red, and one with blue. These are the “primary colors.” Save this exercise. We’ll add to it after I explain a couple more concepts.


There’s no absolute agreement on which three colors are the “real” primary colors, just that they are red, yellow and blue. It was believed that from these three colors, you could product any other color.

Exercise:
To test that, mix your red with yellow to produce an orange and put that color between the red and yellow. Then do the same with red and blue and with blue and yellow. Theoretically, this produces the secondary colors: orange, green and purple. But you will notice that the colors produced are not of the brightest (most saturated) hue. I’m going to assert that that is because the color temperature of the three colors used is not correct. (I’ll cover that more in the section on temperature.)

Here's an example of a "limited-color" color wheel. I did this one with yellow, alizarin crimson and ultramarine blue.



Complements: Each pair of primary plus secondary color is referred to as “complementary.” So red and green are complementary, blue and orange are complementary, and yellow and purple are complementary. Complementary colors, when mixed in paint, result in black. You’ll find that red and green make an excellent black (particularly alizarin crimson and thalo green). Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna (which is actually a dulled down orange) make a very satisfactory black. I’ve never yet gotten a satisfactory black from the yellow-purple combination but probably I’ve just not found the exact complements.

Analogous colors: While complementary colors are across from each other on the color wheel, analogous colors are next to each other. For instance, yellow and red can be viewed as analogous to orange.

Color harmony: This has a lot to do with color harmonies. If you want a very bold (and sometimes unpleasant) contrast, use complementary colors -- particularly if you can get them to the same value. (See discussion of value to follow.) If you want a very harmonious (and possibly a bit dull) picture, work only with a range of analogous colors.

(There could be an exercise here.)

In learning color, it’s useful to start with a limited palette. Working only with the original limited palette, you can produce a wide range of colors. So bear with me while we work some more on the color wheel exercise.

Exercise:
Define a circular area at the center of the color wheel that you made. Mix red, yellow and blue until you get a color close in tone to pure black. Add that black to the center of the color wheel. Notice that across from each primary color is a secondary color. If you mix any of the complementary pairs in the proper proportions, you should get black. However, if you mix in incorrect proportions, you will get the neutral colors (browns and grays.)

(needs example).

You’ve defined, in the exercise above, the Primary (red, yellow, blue) and secondary (orange, purple, green) colors around the theoretical color wheel. This is not a perfect system, but it’s useful to know for color mixing. You could define tertiary colors by painting those colors that fall between each color you have put on the chart. I would, at this point, simply buy a color wheel but it’s a good exercise if you are just familiarizing yourself with the color-mixing process and need practice.

Now, if you recognize that a 3-color-plus-white limited palette will not give you all the secondary colors, what will? Well, you could simply buy 6 colors: Yellow, orange, red, magenta, blue, and green. That would do it. A possible 9 color palette would include Cadmium Red, Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Orange, Cadmium Yellow, Viridian, Ultramarine Blue, Phthalo Blue, Dioxazine Purple and a large Titanium White. Or you could buy a warm and cool version of each primary color. We’ll do a warm-cool color wheel in the temperature section.

Exercise:
There’s another exercise that will improve your familiarity with the mixing of complements. On a page, put a smear or square of yellow, red, and blue on the left side. Then put a smear or square of purple, green and orange (each opposite its complement) on the right side. Draw the complements towards each other in the middle, keeping a clean brush. When you reach the center, you should have a medium gray. As you move back towards the left and right sides, try to capture the gradients of brown neutrals (on the one hand) and gray neutrals (on the other.) This exercise requires that you keep your brush very clean or work with multiple brushes.

Hue (Part One)

Traditionally, painters use a color wheel whose primary colors are red, yellow and blue. The history of the color wheel is interesting. In the mid-eighteenth century, Isaac Newton’s experiments with prisms resulted in the theory that red, yellow and blue were the primary colors. Color theory no longer supports the concept that all other colors can be mixed from these primaries.

At the time of the impressionists, some innovative theory on color was being developed. Chevreul was establishing a color wheel and Rood had just published a work on the theory of color in 1881. The Impressionists (and Neo-Impressionists) adopted these theories and arranged their palettes according to the chromatic tables furnished by the physicists. Following the theory that light, broken up in a prism, gives off seven colors, they adopted these seven colors on their palettes. They excluded black. Duranty, a prominent writer of the time, felt that this handicapped them. Unlike the "true" Impressionists, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, and Edouard Manet did not exclude black. (By the way, another innovation that changed the way painters painted at that time was the rise of a new guild, the colormen [vendors of color], who manufactured ready-mixed paint available in tubes. That made it possible to paint “au plein aire” [outdoors] and introduced a number of new colors.)

To understand color as an artist, it is useful to understand the concept of “gamut.” A gamut is defined as the full range or compass of something; a range from one extreme to the other. If you look around you, the “gamut” of colors in your environment is all the colors that your eye can easily distinguish. When you take a photograph, because of the print process, the gamut of colors produced in the photo is somewhat reduced. You may have noticed that the gamut of colors captured in a cell phone camera is very much less than those you see. The gamut of colors produced by traditional 4-color printing (used to produce magazines, posters, and the “lithograph prints” that some artists charge a bundle for) is limited by the fact that the printer uses only yellow, magenta, cyan and black in the press. High-end fashion magazines or companies with a particular logo that MUST be a specific color will tell the printer to use a “Pantone” color in addition to the 4-color printing. (“Pantone” colors are precise mixtures of color that produce an exact color when printed.) Modern flat bed inkjet printers are somewhat better at reproducing a wider gamut because they have 6 or 7 inks. Some painters have worked with silkscreen printers because the prints they produce are not limited in the amount of costs, but this is a very costly reproduction process.

I'll continue this discussion in the next post.

The beginning of the Chapter on Color

I am making some headway on the chapter on color. This will be a longer chapter than the previous ones, broken down by the attributes of color. As always, I would love your comments, additions, agreements, disagreements, questions, anything that would help. Since this is being posted without examples, some of it may be difficult to grasp. Let me know.

Chapter 4: Color

General theory

The chapter on color is going to be longer than the previous chapters. Color has several attributes used to describe it: hue, value, saturation, and temperature. I will cover each one as a subchapter. Other attributes that will be mentioned are opacity vs. transparency, mineral vs. vegetable composition of paints, and staining vs. non-staining attributes.

Hue is the property which distinguishes red from green. If you ask, “what hue is the sea?” the answer might be: “Aquamarine” or “ultramarine” or just “green” depending on where you are (and the weather). Hue is determined by the wavelength of the color. The colors of the rainbow are considered hues. Browns and grays are not hues.

Value (lightness-darkness) applies to color as well as the gray scale. Yellow has a naturally light value and blue has a naturally strong (dark) value.

Saturation refers to how much pure pigment of the desired hue is present versus medium (medium being that vehicle used to bind the color, such as oil) or other hue. You can desaturate a pure color by adding white, gray, black, a transparent filler or medium (such as water – for watercolors) or the complement of the color. This is often referred to as color intensity or chroma, although chroma has a slightly different meaning to a purist. (Visual artists don’t usually seem to pursue this distinction.)

Temperature refers to whether the color is perceived as warm or cool and is a relative term. Red may seem warm in relation to blue, but may seem cool if placed next to orange.

These attributes work together with line and form to create pictorial depth and composition.

There are some additional terms, such as “shade” (amount of black added), “tint” (amount of white added), and “intensity” (the brightness or dullness of a hue). But I think the main concepts it’s important for a painter to get are the first five.

In doing exercises with color, it’s easier, to my thinking, to work with oils, because they dry slower and allow mixing easier. If you are working with acrylics, you may want to get an acrylic retarder medium to mix with your acrylics to slow the drying time. If you go to any art store or art supply site, just search for “acrylic retarder.”

Exercises in "Form"

The following are some exercises that help you develop your ability to make forms.

Exercise: Making your own forms

Waste some paper on this. Draw some forms that you have been taught (such as a house, an apple, a tree, a person.) Now make some forms of your own. (Don’t try to be perfect.) For instance, make a vase, a window, a hand, a dog. Now go look at these and other forms. Now show your drawings to someone and ask what they remind them of.

Hard and Soft Edges:

Forms exist in space and often, the depiction of a form on a flat canvas is the first step towards creating the illusion of space. Here is where you need to start to observe carefully the use of contrast and line to create edges. A hard edge (created with a lot of contrast or a hard dark line) makes an object appear crisp. But a soft edge is particularly helpful in creating the illusion of a round object. Also, hard edges seem to come forward while soft edges recede, increasing the illusion of depth.

Exercise: form (monochrome)

Set up a still life consisting of some very simple thing or things, preferably white or off white, such as a couple of eggs or a cup and saucer. Set up the light so there is a strong directional light. Paint or draw with attention to the roundness, the edges, the places where the form is lost and light flows through. I want you to see that form is defined by edges and you can control the composition by using the edges to allow the eye to move around the painting.

Basic or home value

There’s another aspect of value that is helpful in starting a painting. Some refer to it as “home value” or basic value. It’s easiest to see if you look at an object that is all one basic color or value, like a cup. When you shine a light on it from a direction, parts of the object become darker and lighter. An approach to the object is to first establish the “home value” and then to lighten and darken the object (and, of course, the space around the object) according to the direction of the light source.

Exercise:

This exercise gets you to find the "home value" or basic value of a subject and then lighten and darken it. The exercise should be done with paint, using only shades of grey or brown. You can use burnt umber and white or black and white or a combination of blue and brown and white. Set up three objects, one light, one medium, and one dark, in front of you. Paint the basic value of each object, so that it is all one shape. Then, if possible while the paint is still wet, start developing the darks and lights on each object, working out from the "Home value". Notice that the light object will be all in the light shades of grey. The medium object will be all in the medium tones and the dark object will fall all toward the darker tones of grey.

Chapter 3: form

Here is the rough beginning of the next chapter of my proposed workbook. Any comments, suggestions, questions are appreciated. I will be out of town for a few weeks soon, and probably will not be able to start the chapter on color until my return.

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Value is the primary way we perceive form. In fact, some teachers will tell you that the “focal point” of a painting is the spot of greatest contrast. Through form, line and value, we begin to perceive depth on the flat plane. Color with its attributes is another aspect that I will discuss later.

Often, our perception of form in the world around us is not a “cut-and-dried” thing. It is a matter of closure. We perceive something that signals a “form” and we apprehend it (comprehend it) as a car, or a jar or a tree. Closure is the ability of the mind to complete a pattern or picture where only suggestion exists.

But your “trained” perception can lead you astray as a creative artist. When you were a child, you may have been taught by adults “how to draw a house or an apple.” Thereafter, you have established a mental symbol for house or apple to work from. That leads you to assume that, when you are looking at an apple, etc., you should supply the symbol. But I am asking you to look for yourself, look newly. If you understand that concept of closure, you can use it as needed without being restrained by past symbols.

There’s a great example of a mis-represented form in the book The Little Prince by Saint-Exupéry. The little prince draws a picture. It looks like a hat – one of the kind that men used to wear in the thirties. But actually, it is a picture of a snake who has swallowed an elephant.

“I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them.



But they answered: "Frighten? Why should any one be frightened by a hat?"

My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. But since the grown-ups were not able to understand it, I made another drawing: I drew the inside of a boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. They always need to have things explained.”

Mixing two colors to get gray

At this point, I would like you to explore the use of two colors and white to mix your grey tones. Select burnt Sienna, ultramarine and titanium white. Burnt sienna and ultramarine blue, mixed in proper proportions, make a good dark color—a black. Mixed with varying amounts of white, this mixture makes all the intermediate grays. I’d like you to use this mixture for the remaining exercises in value and, subsequently, form, because it gets you used to mixing color and away from the use of black paint.

Please understand, that I have nothing against black. It is useful, when the object you are painting is in fact black. But too often, the beginning student uses black to darken color. In this workbook, I want you to discover other ways to darken color while not dulling it.

Exercise
In this exercise, you begin mixing color to produce grey. You should have white, ultramarine blue, and burnt sienna on your palette. If you mix the blue and the sienna in the right proportions, you get a good black. Combining with white will produce all your intermediate gray tones. Set up a simple still life with good directional lighting. Concentrate on translating it as a drawing using only 3 values, a dark, a medium and a light tone. Mix the three tones on the palette, using the palette knife in order to restrict yourself.

To get a good distribution of values throughout the painting from very light to very dark values, it is useful to start with a medium-toned ground. If working with oils, I recommend mixing a medium grey and covering the canvas evenly and letting it fry a sufficient amount of time. (Hint: if you want to do this, raw umber mixed with flake white or underpainting white gives you the fastest drying time and a nice warm gray. I know, I know, I didn’t include these colors on the supply list. Get over it.) An alternative is to use gray gesso or black gesso mixed with white gesso. Most canvases are prepared these days using white gesso. Try to get a gray that is midway between black and white.

The reason it is useful to work on a toned ground is that, if you start to apply values to a white canvas, the white of the canvas acts as part of the tonal composition and you are liable to find yourself working too dark or too light overall.

Alternate exercise:
If you want to practice working on a medium toned ground, You can start with a medium grey paper and use black and white chalks.

Value is relative

NOTE: In this post, I continue the discussion on value with some exercises included. I am having to post the putative "book" backwards, since the blog scrolls down. You may want to go back to prior posts and review from the beginning.

I have said that value is relative. This is a point that you should give some importance to. Since your ability to perceive or depict differences of value may be limited, you may have to exaggerate the differences in tone in two adjoining forms or spaces.

Exercise:
Set up a simple still life with strong directional lighting. Concentrate on translating it as a drawing using only 3 flat values, a dark, a medium and a light tone. For this exercise, you may want to mix the three values on the palette, using the palette knife. I don't usually encourage use of the palette knife, and I’ll explain why in the Chapter on color. However, for this exercise, it comes in handy to have three distinct values. You can also do this exercise using a soft lead pencil, ink washes or other media that will give three distinct values. Or, you can use torn paper again, using white, black and medium grey.

Many successful landscape painters train themselves to visualize the landscape in four broad tones: dark, light and 2 middle grays.

Exercise:
As an exercise, limiting yourself to just 4 tones, do an interpretation of a landscape (or still life if it’s winter). For quick sketching, you may want to look into purchasing a set of grey markers. These can be found at any good art supply store on on-line art supply store. They even come in “warm” and “cool” grays.

Once, when I was a student, I was given the skull of a very small animal and told to spend the semester doing a rendition of the tones I saw on a piece of paper that covered one wall of the studio. I was allowed to use warm and cool grays and given some discretion as to how flat I made the forms. A copy of it follows and I have reproduced it in both its warm and cool grays and reduced to just gray scale.

Value, Continued

It is often asserted that value is the most important design element in a painting. To “demonstrate” this for yourself, notice that, if you take a black and white print of a “good” painting and a black and white print of a “so-so” or bad painting, you will see, usually, that the “good” painting has sharp differentiation of light and dark areas. This high contrast creates impact. You can even test this out with your own work. Take a photo of something you’ve worked on and get it reproduced in black and white. Does it have contrast? What could you do to improve it?

On the other hand, an artist can “break” this rule and effectively use “high key” or “low key” painting to create a mood. Key refers to the overall value of a painting. A high key painting is mostly pale, such as paintings of misty coastlines. Monet frequently painted in mostly pale colors. On the other hand, Ryder often painted night paintings which were mostly somber. This is called a low key painting. A painting can be low-key and high contrast or high-key and high contrast. For example, Ryder’s night paintings of the sea containing a moon were low key but high contrast.

Exercise:
The most limited tonal exercise (and fun to do), is to take black construction paper and tear it up into pieces of different sizes and shapes. Position these on a piece of white paper until you have something that is pleasing to you. (Don’t worry about this, please.) You can glue the pieces down with white glue or an acid-free glue stick (available from Office Depot.)

Exercise:
Look around for a landscape or still life and do a painting or drawing that is high-key and low contrast. Observe what you are doing to achieve this and write it down.