Often I hear teachers, including myself, describe values as the structure, framework or foundation of a painting. And it’s true, they are. But, how excited can we get about that? It sounds more like something we have to do or should do to get to something more exciting or interesting. Sort of like taking your […]
Value, Color and Movement
One of the most powerful compositional tools we have as landscape painters is our ability to move the eye of the viewer around the picture plane and even create the illusion of movement into the picture plane by creating the illusion of depth. Movement is a visual pathway through the painting that the artist creates […]
Mixing Fall Foliage Colors
When mixing fall foliage colors, it’s important to keep value in mind (as always!), best ways to maintain chroma, and overall color harmony. Take a look at this video for tips on mixing autumn colors that sing! P.S. Our online course Drawing and Painting Trees starts September 30th! Join us!
Mixing Blues For Skies
When mixing colors for skies we concern ourselves with the three attributes of color: value, temperature and chroma. As we know from Carlson’s Theory of Angles, the sky will generally be the lightest value in the landscape–a range of values actually, as the value of the sky grades from lightest at the horizon to darkest […]
Mixing Low Chroma Greens
In the recent post Simplify Mixing Greens we saw how using Chromatic Black as a starting point for mixing greens can result in a wide variety of naturalistic greens. In this short video, I use Williamsburg Neutral Greys as a starting point to mix low chroma greens. You can use the premixed Williamsburg or Gamblin […]
Water: Color in Reflections
Painting water is an endlessly challenging subject. In addition to understanding the visual science of how we perceive reflections, as artists we also need to think about how to best depict those perceptions in color! Here are a few helpful color notes to think about when painting reflections: ~the depth of the water (the deeper […]