Seeing Clean Color
by Armand Cabrera
When
most people first attempt to paint in oils, they see gray
and brown everywhere and they paint shadows black and
lifeless.
To keep your paintings from being dull, forget
about grays, browns and blacks.
Get in the habit of thinking of color in terms of primary
colors: yellow, red, and blue. All other colors are simply
combinations of these primary colors. By staying with
primary colors, you have a clear color choice from which
to relate. It is a subtle difference, but an important
one. Once a color choice is decided upon, you can determine
its value, saturation and temperature relative to the
colors around it. Mixing clean color comes from understanding
which primaries are needed in its creation.
To see clean color, you need to carefully consider your
palette. To get a more personal color sense, remove all
the secondary and tertiary colors from your palette. Mixing
the color you see from a limited palette will force you
to think about the color you mix and its relationship
to the colors around it. This process helps the artist
obtain a better understanding of color. I suggest a palette
of warm and cool primaries, plus white.
- Titanium White
- Cobalt Blue
- Ultramarine Blue
- Alizarin Crimson Permanent
- Cadmium Red Light
- Cadmium Yellow Medium
- Cadmium Yellow Lemon
If you’re really serious about accurately mixing
color, limit yourself to one each of blue, red , yellow,
plus white.
Here’s Stefan Baumann’s palette:
- Titanium White
- Cobalt Blue
- Alizarin Crimson Permanent
- Cadmium Yellow Light
Here’s the palette I choose:
- Titanium White
- Ultramarine Blue
- Alizarin Crimson Permanent
- Cadmium Yellow Medium
Remember to always use real pigments and not hues. Because
of the composition of hues, they are not reliable for
accurate mixing. I use and recommend Gamblin
Artist’s Oil Colors.
