Artgx

Whether an artist is specialising in pet portraits, landscapes, or traditional portraits, keeping colours as bright as possible is an important part of producing paintings that appear fresh an clean.

The way in which any colour appears is dependant on the circumstance in which it is seen. The way a colour is seen is effected by the colours next to it and on which it is placed. For example, yellow will appear washed out and pale next to white, but vivid next to black. Colour also represents tone and can be put into groups. Lemon yellows, golden yellows, oranges and yellow earth colours can be subsituted for one another in mixtures or used to shade each other when describing form. In addition, many colours will have an undertone, that is to say they have some element of another colour within their mix. For instance, red may range from having pronounced yellow undertones to blue.

Laying out your palette
Firstly, the artist should always consider the permanence of his or her colours and limit these to as few as possible, try to avoid colours that are very similar. Laying out your palette correctly is important, as it will make the painting process much easier. Messy palettes, where colours pollute each other, will muddy their appearance and hence, the appearance of the painting. For complicated techniques, that involve several stages, it is best to lay out a selection of palettes for each stage of the process. The aim is to have colours placed far enough away from each other so that they do not get contaminated plus, the area where you mix these colours, should also be kept away from the original colours so that you keep them as bright as possible. Best practice for colour arrangement, is to place them in order of importance along the top of the palette, so that the most used colours are within easy reach. White is usually placed nearest the thumb (in the ‘top’ spot as it were), but some artists like to have the white in the centre of the line. If special colour mixes or shades are anticipated, these can be set out in lines under the main colours.

Colour mixing
The permanence of colour is decreased when mixed, a few colours can become very impermanent if diluted too much. So, when mixing colours, you should keep the number used to no more than three, this will avoid colours getting too muddy. However, you need to bear in mind that many commercial colours are already a mixture of different pigments, so will be more likely to create muddy colours if over mixed. Brighter tones can be achieved without the loss of colour intensity by mixing with sympathetic colours.