Archive for February, 2010
Intensity: The Third Dimension of Color
Intensity is the third dimension of color and refers to the strength, saturation, or purity of the color. In most cases, the color is at its greatest intensity as it comes from the tube.
To reduce the intensity of a color, white may be added to lighten it or black may be added to darken it. In both cases the purity of the color is decreased. Also notice that as the intensity is weakened, the value has changed. The intensity of a color can also be weakened by adding its complement. For example, blue can be grayed by adding orange.
Nature is full of such a variety of colors! If one is doing landscape paintings, it is very important to be able to control intensity, value, and hue, because changing one nearly always changes the other two as well.
Value: The Second Dimension of Color
The second dimension of color is value. Value is the most important dimension for any artist working in color. Errors made in hue or intensity are much less serious than errors made in value.
The value of a color refers only to the lightness or darkness of a color. If we lighten the pure color by adding white, the result is called a tint. If we darken a color by adding black, the result is called a shade. In neither case did we change the hue, only the value.
In landscape paintings, the artist must recognize value differences in the subject and properly interpret them using the colors on the palette. The dark of some landscapes is much darker than the black of the palette, whereas, the reflection of light on a metal is many times lighter than the white.
Hue: The First Dimension of Color
Hue is the name used to denote a color. Red, yellow, purple, pea-green, etc., are different hues and are found on different locations on the color wheel.
The three primary colors of pigments are red, yellow, and blue. They are pure colors and cannot be made by combining any other colors. In my mental image of the color wheel, red is at 12:00 o’clock, yellow is at 4:00 o’clock and blue is at 8:00 o’clock.
The secondary colors are mixtures. Red and yellow combine to form orange (at 2:00), yellow and blue form green (at 6:00), and blue and red form purple (at 10:00).
Colors that are adjacent on the color wheel are said to be harmonious because each contains some color of the one next to it. Colors that are opposite on the color wheel are not at all related, and are called complements. When these are mixed, they form black, but when used in the same oil painting, they make the painting pop!
Mixing Colors for Oil Paintings
In order for us to see anything, there must be light. Light from the sun contains all the colors, as demonstrated when the sun light shines through a prism and is broken into all the colors of the rainbow.
When the sun shines on a red apple, we see that the apple is red because the skin of the apple absorbs the remaining colors. Likewise, a green apple reflects the green light and absorbs the others.
Paints that we use in oil paintings are especially dense in pigments. When we mix them, we are mixing “color”. We are working with the pigments that reflect the colors we want to see (and absorbing all the rest), and combining these colors to form the other colors we want to see.
Shape, Value and Edge
If you stop to think about it for a minute, you will realize that when you look at anything, three parts are involved: shape, value, and edges. You will probably recognize the shape at once. Is it a pear, a box, or a silo (or, whatever)? The value is the color you would see if the image were reproduced in black and white. Is it inky black or almost white, or somewhere in between?
When looking at something nearby, you are probably aware of the sharp edge that exists between one shape and another. When looking at something far away, the edge between two shapes is less distinct.
In landscape paintings, what matters to the viewer is whether the distant mountains seem to be far away, and the objects in the foreground seem close. To the artist, it’s a matter of shape, value and edge.
Oils or Acrylic?
Acrylic painting versus oil painting. What is the difference? Acrylics dry quickly and can be used straight from the tube, or diluted with water or other medium, and used like watercolors. Often a spray bottle is used to spray a fine mist over the paint on the palette in order to keep it moist. Because acrylics dry so fast, more layers can be added immediately and the painting easily modified as it develops.The Delight of Nature
We have had a string of cool, cloudy, rainy days recently. Cloudy is OK if the sun shines periodically enabling the artist to see shadows because shadows are important for landscape paintings to look natural. Cloudy is also OK if no shade is available because your canvas is not supposed to be in the sun. It gives the artist a false sense of color in that colors often appear to be lighter than they would in shade or indoors.
Recently, I found a quote by Winston Churchill that expresses how I feel. “A heightened sense of the observation of nature is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint”.
Gauguin in Tahiti
Gauguin took his oil painting discovery even further in Tahiti, which also did not fulfill his dream of finding the “noble savage” – as Europeans had already turned the island into an extension of Europe. But he was able to use the contrast between what he had hoped for and what he found. He often placed a primitive scene in the foreground and images of civilized life in the background, and eliminated perspective and shading so the background encroached on the foreground.
Gauguin’s manipulation of traditional perspective and his expressive use of color had a major influence on the late -19th- and early -20th-century art movements especially Fauvism and Expressionism. In 1901, Picasso saw several Gauguin paintings at a friend’s home, and they inspired him to launch into his Blue Period. It is no wonder that he is among the founders of modern art.
Gauguin in Brittany
Gauguin, who had studied landscape painting under Pissarro, and began his career as an Impressionist, abandoned Impressionism in Brittany. He created a new system called Synthetism (also known as Symbolism) by building on Cloisonnism. This term comes from cloisonné, an enameling process in which colored enamels are poured into metal chambers that outline figures and objects. His paintings had large patches of vivid color bordered by thick black lines, each patch being one color with a minimum of shading.
The turning point in his career was the painting ” The Vision After the Sermon” (Jacob wrestling with an angel). In this painting, praying Breton women are imagining the battle between Jacob and the Angel.
The psychological side of the painting is even more revolutionary than the technique. Gauguin combines the physical world of the Breton women and the psychological world of their visions of the wrestling match into one painting. By using flattened perspective and Cloisonnism, he was able to combine people’s inner visions with the world around them.