Hi, Ian Roberts. Mastering Composition and Simplifying the Painting Process. Last week I said I was going to talk about sketching using thumbnails, which
is better pen or pencil? And I got a lot, I did, I've
been doing a couple of demos in the last couple of weeks and I've had so many
people asking me about my palette and about
color temperature because I've been doing,
you know, the image of Montreal, and the image of Venice, and the warm and the
cool light. So I thought I would focus on color
temperature this week. Now, this is a picture of my
palette. It's a 36, no, 30 by 24 inch sheet of
glass and the main thing to notice about that.
It doesn't really matter exactly what all the different paint colors are,
is that it's in the color wheel, right? Yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, green, and if you brought the green and
the yellow together at the bottom, you'd have the color wheel. And I always
put it in the same order and that's just like a pianist almost,
you know, it's just like he knows where the keys are. You just kind of get used
to reaching when you need warm and cool
colors. The other thing is temperature is
important, color temperature, and the reason
is that if you look at the great wide world and it's in three dimensions
and there's sun shining, a real sun shining on
three-dimensional objects and we're trying to take that whole magnificence
and put it on a two-dimensional surface using
some different colors and pigments and some of them are even
dirt mixed up with oil and putting them on with like
pig's hair and you're thinking... Okay, we've got a disadvantage in terms of
expressing the whole world. So we need as many tools as we possibly can.
Value is probably, well it is, the most important...
Composition underneath, value masses, but then temperature allows us to pull
more life out of those value masses and that's what I'm going to look at today. I'm just taking this particular photograph... And I'm doing a very simple painting of it. It's not really a demo painting, but I
just want to isolate four colors and look at the value of
them and the color temperature of them and
see how it brings the image more to life. So I hope you find that
engaging and useful and I'll see you at the end. So here's a simple demonstration painting I did
to illustrate this idea. So we have four colors we're going to look at... The lit side and the dark side of the trees, the lit side and the dark side of the beach. And there's a temperature shift between warm
and cool, warm and cool, of a particular amount that is constant
in the whole picture. So seeing that image in black and white,
we have the same thing. There's the temperature shift,
but embedded in that is the value shift between the lit side and the dark side,
the lit side and the dark side, and let's say that shift
is three steps on the gray scale. It'll be three steps, give or take, on the
gray scale here too. Now, obviously it won't
always be three if you get, I don't know the desert
in the middle of the day compared to an English sunrise...
You're going to get a different percentage of warm and cool
and value shift. But it''s constant within that image. So what I want to look at here is the color temperature shift between the lit
side of the trees and the dark side and
the lit side of the beach and the shadow side of the beach and show you the color
shift. So, so far everything water sky is pretty
cool, and I just wanted to put that in so it was done so the whole thing would
start to kind of come together. So I'm going to put in a color, mix a color,
for these trees back in here and then this mass here, is going to be darker. So starting off, it's chrome oxide green, ultramarine blue. Just a tiny
bit of dioxazine purple, and I'm putting, I mean, I'm not getting
it so it's icy cold, I've got some yellow ochre in
there as well. And I'm going to put it in here Maybe warmer, but... This is just a big mass of dark here And I'm going to have to get that to
stand out eventually And then the beach! Okay and
we've got blue. This pretty much gives us a gray and
we're going to warm it up because it's a beach.
It's not that dark. That should do it. Now I'm not getting very excited about. The brush work here, I'm just laying it in
for the sake of getting these colors so we can
see them. All right. So let's put the sunlit side
of those trees in and I think you'll see... Now, I'm going to clean the pallet
because those are the dark cools. I want to make sure that I don't get
them muddied up with the lighter, warmer colors and
nothing pretty much turns your painting to mud quicker than getting those two
muddled. This is the sunlit grass or trees so we have cad yellow light or
actually cad yellow lemon. And I'm going to warm it up a bit,
maybe not quite that much, tiny hit of white, And that'll do it. So we're starting off
with this as the base color and then we're using these warm colors
here to give it a sense of sunlight. And then we're going to get sort of a
gray warm it up make it a little grayer yet Now we can see the light coming through
to that tree there and then there's just this one little
shaft of light on the beach back there that says, "Oh, I see, sunlight!" Now I'm not varying it much here. And there's the finished painting. Now I
jumped ahead because I just really wanted to show the mixing of those four
colors and the sense of sunlight and of warmth and cool that is so much
more intense or engaging than just black and
white. So I hope that was useful and engaging!
Please like the video if you did. Subscribe if you haven't. Sign up on my
email list if you're not getting it on Tuesdays.
Share it with your friends! I will see you next Tuesday. I hope you have a great
week I hope your painting goes well. I hope
everything else in your life goes well and I'll see you next Tuesday. Bye, for
now.
