Well, I’ve been feeling kind of stuck with my painting this month. That’s why I haven’t been painting. If I’m not painting, I’m not blogging either. So, there…
However, a few things happened to kind of jump start me again. This process continues to amaze me. I’m glad I’ve decided to journal this experience so I can have documentation of the various steps and how they unfolded.
I didn’t realize it but one area in which I was still feeling sorely inadequate had to do with color, specifically mixing and using color.
As has happened so many times on this journey, if I keep my eyes open, someone comes along to take me through and impart wisdom. So it happened with my education about color. PBS started airing a new instructional video, or new to me. A married couple, Gary and Kathwren Jenkins, teach how to paint beautiful, large-scale floral paintings. In their instructions they talk particularly about utilizing color to paint vivid, full-of-life paintings.
Gary emphasized using pigment-rich paints. This is something I’ve discovered and I believe I talked a little bit about it in another post on this blog. Using the more expensive paint really gives a richer look to the painting. He also talked about the fact that a white object in a painting really has many different colors. He painted a magnolia blossom which we all know is white. However, to paint it richly many different colors were used in the shading of the pedals and the shadows. He talked about looking at a white wall carefully and seeing the different colors that are really there, that we kind of take for granted. Those are my words, not his.
As he described how he used color in his painting, I saw that he would plan his paintings so that a huge yellow blossom would ultimately go over a part of the background that had been painted purple. Since those are complimentary colors, the yellow looked like a richer yellow because of the purple in the background. Other instructors have talked about complimentary colors but Gary talked about the subject in such a way that I saw it differently.
If you haven’t already done so, I urge you to do some research and learn about the color wheel.
Another recent development that has restarted my painting is the creation of what I call a color chart. I took a 16x20 canvas and marked a 1-inch grid in pencil across the face of the canvas. Skipping the first square in the top left corner, I labeled each square across the top with the name of a paint in my pallet. Again, skipping that first square in the top left corner, I labeled each square going down the left side of the canvas, one color in each square, and in the same order as the paints across the top.
In any given block on the grid, I took the two colors at the top and side of the canvas and mixed equal parts of those paints. I mixed right on the canvas and left a sample of the mixture in the grid.
In this method, each color intersected each other color twice on the graph. So, in the lower left half of the grid, I also mixed a touch of white with the two colors in the original mixture. I did this because many of the colors were rather dark and mixing them with white would allow me to see exactly what color I had.
Here’s a photograph of the chart. I’ve already found it very helpful because I can find the shade of green or blue that I want for a particular item and then adjust from there. Before making this chart, I wasn’t sure how to get a sage green, for example.
However, a few things happened to kind of jump start me again. This process continues to amaze me. I’m glad I’ve decided to journal this experience so I can have documentation of the various steps and how they unfolded.
I didn’t realize it but one area in which I was still feeling sorely inadequate had to do with color, specifically mixing and using color.
As has happened so many times on this journey, if I keep my eyes open, someone comes along to take me through and impart wisdom. So it happened with my education about color. PBS started airing a new instructional video, or new to me. A married couple, Gary and Kathwren Jenkins, teach how to paint beautiful, large-scale floral paintings. In their instructions they talk particularly about utilizing color to paint vivid, full-of-life paintings.
Gary emphasized using pigment-rich paints. This is something I’ve discovered and I believe I talked a little bit about it in another post on this blog. Using the more expensive paint really gives a richer look to the painting. He also talked about the fact that a white object in a painting really has many different colors. He painted a magnolia blossom which we all know is white. However, to paint it richly many different colors were used in the shading of the pedals and the shadows. He talked about looking at a white wall carefully and seeing the different colors that are really there, that we kind of take for granted. Those are my words, not his.
As he described how he used color in his painting, I saw that he would plan his paintings so that a huge yellow blossom would ultimately go over a part of the background that had been painted purple. Since those are complimentary colors, the yellow looked like a richer yellow because of the purple in the background. Other instructors have talked about complimentary colors but Gary talked about the subject in such a way that I saw it differently.
If you haven’t already done so, I urge you to do some research and learn about the color wheel.
Another recent development that has restarted my painting is the creation of what I call a color chart. I took a 16x20 canvas and marked a 1-inch grid in pencil across the face of the canvas. Skipping the first square in the top left corner, I labeled each square across the top with the name of a paint in my pallet. Again, skipping that first square in the top left corner, I labeled each square going down the left side of the canvas, one color in each square, and in the same order as the paints across the top.
In any given block on the grid, I took the two colors at the top and side of the canvas and mixed equal parts of those paints. I mixed right on the canvas and left a sample of the mixture in the grid.
In this method, each color intersected each other color twice on the graph. So, in the lower left half of the grid, I also mixed a touch of white with the two colors in the original mixture. I did this because many of the colors were rather dark and mixing them with white would allow me to see exactly what color I had.
Here’s a photograph of the chart. I’ve already found it very helpful because I can find the shade of green or blue that I want for a particular item and then adjust from there. Before making this chart, I wasn’t sure how to get a sage green, for example. 
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