10 Tips For Better Colors In Your Paintings

so in this video i'm going to give you 10 great tips to help you wield color better in your paintings [Music] all right welcome to paint coach my name is chris fornitero and i'm here to help simplify oil painting so that you can get better faster all right i'm going to jump right in with tip number one which is change the way you think about color see i get a lot of students that ask me oh how did you get that color or what is the recipe for skin tones what is the recipe of colors for this try hard not to think about mixing colors like a recipe where it's you know two parts this one part that and one part this and you get the color i feel like that's not the best way to think about it it's not going to make you a sufficient color mix yeah you can learn quick little recipe for colors but that's preventing you from understanding how color works when you're trying to get a specific color be thinking about where you need to shift it to or push it to to get the color you want to keep the cooking analogy going think about it as if you're making a big thing of soup and you're occasionally testing it out and seeing doll doesn't need more salt doesn't need more pepper doesn't need more garlic does any more this or that you know when i'm mixing a color i'm always thinking doesn't need more red does it need more blue some yellow or white i'm not trying to remember a recipe i learned one time for the color of leaves on a tree and when you think about color that way color mixing is going to become very instinctual a lot of times i'm not even thinking about it i'm just naturally pushing the color where i want it to go this ties into a thing that i've talked about a lot which is starting out by understanding the primary colors that's red blue and yellow and white so if you understand how to mix all your colors from those primary colors it's going to give you such a strong understanding of color and you have a great foundation that way when you add in other colors to your palette you're going to know what to do with them you're not going to need to rely on recipes of colors for things all right tip number two is label colors at first to match them now what exactly do i mean by that well i always say you know look at your reference isolate the color you're trying to get and match it so you have to start somewhere with a color now a lot of times you see colors that aren't obvious what color it is i get a lot of people asking me like oh like what color is that and my answer is always isolate it and then choose whatever color you think it's close to out of you know like the six major colors you know red blue yellow orange green and purple a lot of times when i see a color i throw it into one of those categories in my head and then go from there because there's a million ways to get to a color like there's no one right way to get to a certain color but you got to start somewhere so for example in this painting the table a lot of people looking at me like oh like what color is that like oh is that a gray first off helpful little tip within a tip don't think of gray as a color think about gray as something that you do to a color that way you know where to start because if you just think of gray as a color you're just going to go black white and get gray and you're going to lose the opportunity for more color in your painting instead choose a color and be like oh it's a gray down blue it's a gray down purple and in this painting i saw that as a grayed down purple or a desaturated purple you know so i'd mix up a purple red and blue it was pretty light so i'd add some white and then i'd add purple's complement which is yellow and then dial it into where i want but you see i chose a color to start with i chose purple you know if i chose blue i could still get to there if i chose green i could probably still get to there just take a little longer and with more and more practice you'll get better at identifying it right from the start and not having to do as many steps all right tip number three is reuse piles of color on your palette you know every single time you mix up a new color you don't have to start a new pile this is very helpful to add color harmony to your painting especially when you're finding a bunch of different colors for the same object having them all derived from the same pool of paint is going to help them all work together now yes if you're painting something that calls for a very clean color you're going to want to start a new pile of paint for example with this lime wedge in the painting i started out with a dark green and once i had that dark green pile to start with you can see i just manipulated that green into different varying types of greens as i painted that lime wedge and if you're watching my videos you've probably heard me talk a lot about working dark to light i guess this happens a lot with my colors too because i started with the darkest green that i had and as it went i kind of found lighter and lighter greens because it's easier to lighten paint as you go posted darkening in it so i guess i did that too didn't really realize that all right tip number four is pay attention to color relationships i am always comparing the colors on my painting and in my head i'm not thinking necessarily oh that's red or that's blue or that's yellow since i'm comparing it to other colors i'm thinking oh that's red der or that's bluer or that's yellower compared to what's around it and i'm always moving around the painting adjusting my colors as i put in more colors for example when i was painting this orange after i'd gotten it in i realized that i needed to adjust the ground color because now having that orange as another reference point for the color the grout i realized oh i need to push a little more orange into the ground right there you know i couldn't see it until i put that orange and then just having that to compare it to made it easier for me to pick up on but i wouldn't have picked up on it if i wasn't one to step back and compare my colors just remember all colors are relative to what's around it all right now before we move on if you struggle with color mixing like if you don't know exactly how to use the primaries in white to mix up all your colors i actually offered the color mixing video from my foundations of oil painting course for free i'll put a link to where you get that in the description below alright tip number five is value is more important than color i feel like most of the time when students think they have a color problem they actually have a value problem now value is how light or dark a color is you know take this painting for example the reason it works is because the value relationships are dialed in correctly that's how you make it look like certain areas are brighter than others and the light shining through you know certain parts of the fruit now this painting's actually a tutorial on my patreon page so here's a student that painted the same painting and you can see they have really great colors all the colors are spot on it's just they didn't exactly dial in the values enough if i put it in black and white you can see they could have gone darker in certain areas to make the lighter areas brighter it's so important that you dial in the value relationships what's darker than what what's lighter than what to get things to really pop and to help you with this i always suggest when you're starting your painting to get the easiest value first whatever that is for you for this it was the background you know it's pretty much the darkest value you can get i didn't use black i used ultramarine blue and some burnt sienna but i knew it was gonna be the darkest value so if i got that in at the start i could get it right without having to compare it to anything so once i had that i could use it as a key for the rest of the painting all right tip number six is pay attention to color saturation now very rarely are you going to be using colors straight out of the tube or two colors mixed straight out of the tube very rarely in nature are you going to find that vibrant of colors the way you desaturate colors is by adding some of its complement so if you got orange add a little bit of oranges complement which is blue that will knock it down not make it as vibrant green and red purple and yellow the good old-fashioned color wheel now here i have another student example of the painting and you can see that they got their values right but they really didn't capture the light shining through a lot of the fruit that's because they didn't push the saturation of the colors in certain key areas i'm going to combine a previous tip with this tip and say always be standing back and comparing all of your colors again saturation is relative to all the colors that are on the painting all right number seven is a little bit different of a tip and it is to clean your brush using a paper towel i go through a lot of paper towels when i clean my brush in between colors i switch it around in the paint thinner a little bit and i always have paper towels in my left hand and i'm constantly pinching the paint out of the bristles it's just become second nature to me like i always have paper towels in my right hand and i go through a lot of paper towels but that's going to get the brush really clean really quickly which is going to help you not muddy up your colors i mean it's not like 100 perfectly clean but it's enough that it's not going to affect my colors i feel like i tell a lot of students this and they had no idea because a lot of times when you watch people paint you know they're handholding the paper towels are off camera it is with all my tutorials so a lot of people aren't aware of how much i am constantly cleaning my brush on my paper towels and so invest in paper towels all right tip number eight is don't use too much white i find a lot of people will go straight to white to lighten a color when they might be able to use a different color to lighten it and if you use too much white you run the risk of your colors looking dull or chalky phyllis happens a lot with greens in this student's painting of the fruit i feel like their greens aren't as strong as they could be i think instead of adding white to lighten it up if they would have added more yellow maybe a little bit of red they'd have a much stronger richer more accurate green for that lime a lot of this comes back to what i was talking about earlier and being able to isolate a color and then match it and i'm not gonna lie just takes practice of being able to look at a color and accurately match it alright speaking of white let's move on to tip number nine which is try not to go to pure white i guess this is more of a value tip but i always tell students try not to go to pure white because a lot of times it's not the right color very very seldom are you gonna have to use pure white it's very tricky a lot of times you think you do the example always tell people you know if they're painting a cloud a lot of times people will paint the light parts of clouds pretty much straight white i always ask them well what if there was a white seagull in front of that white cloud what would you use to paint that white seagull so it would actually stand out from the cloud and that you know makes it click in their head that it you know if you go to pure white on that it doesn't leave you anywhere else to go forget what master painter was i don't know if it was sergeant or soroya that when they would paint landscape they'd hang a white piece of cloth out in front of them as a reference to help gauge the values of the scene so for example in this painting even when i put this bright highlight on the lemon i still added a little bit of yellow to it so whenever you're painting something and you think you need to go pure white stop and think is it really pure white would it be as bright as a white cloth in the sunlight if that was in your scene this could also mean don't push things too bright in your painting i used that a lot with skies when i first started painting plein air landscapes i'd always think the sky was way lighter than it really was and when i put my sky in light then it caused me to key in everything else too bright just in general i feel like students tend to paint things brighter than they really are all right tip number 10 is start with a flat average color now what i mean by that is before you paint something squint your eyes and try and see that object as just one flat color and when you squint your eyes you're going to get an average of the colors that are in it it's not gonna be the lightest light or the darkest dark but painting that first is gonna help you figure out all the other variations of color within that shape for example with the lemon wheel here i painted all one flat color first to help me get the overall general color and value right and then i could go in and start altering certain areas and adding colors and changing colors but getting that first initial flat color helps you so much figure out all the other colors all right those are my 10 tips if you've got some good color tips of your own please leave those in the comment section of this video if you liked the video please hit the like button subscribe to the channel if you want to see what i'm painting on a daily basis you can follow me on instagram at forza43 i'm chris fornitero here telling you to go get painting

Channel: Paint Coach

Views: 160,713

Keywords: color mixing tips for oil painting, 10 Tips For Better Colors In Your Paintings, how to keep your oil colors from getting muddy, basics of color mixing for oil paints, where to start when oil painting, oil painting color mixing tutorial for beginners, how to get vibrant colors with oil paint, the secret to colormixing for oil paint, oil painting how to match colors, beginner color mixing tips you need to know

Id: sqCveRW-prc

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Mon May 02 2022