One COLOR MIXING STRATEGY to Improve your PAINTINGS | Art Tips for Beginners + Demonstration

Hello everyone and welcome for this new video. In this episode I want to share with you a color mixing strategy that can help you get better colors in your paintings. This is not a secret color is a very complicated subject let alone color mixing... Think about this : a painter is almost like a musician who would have to invent all the notes before playing. And trust me I've been working on a course on color theory for a while now and yeah, it's really a challenge to make color and color theory easy to understand and easy to use. And while I was trying to make this happen I thought about my first attempts at using color and no surprise there ! I was really bad at using colors at first.. the thing is I couldn't really control the colors everything I was mixing on my palette was not really happening on the canvas and I couldn't like control cutter from the beginning all the way to the end there was something missing there was a missing link in between and all the recommendations that I had around me were like yeah use a color checking device use color wheels well don't even get me started on color wheels use a I don't know like use warm and cool or use complementary colors and I don't know this was all good recommendations but in my head it was still not working and I still couldn't really control Carl there was always this gap between what I was doing on the palette and what was happening on the canvas like let's say I was mixing something on my palette and I was confident this was the right color and when I was trying to use it on the canvas it didn't work or I would just use some random color on the palette in and like it would work to my surprise on the canvas one discovery was really a revelation for me and made me really understand how to mix and control color is that there are two types of color mixing there is pallet mixing and canvas mixing well pallet mixing is like easy to understand it's the principle way of getting your colors it's like you prepare them on your pallet either with your pallet knife or with your brush you mix everything and you get the cutter on your pallet and use it on your canvas but there's also something that well I call canvas mixing it's really surface mixing it's after you have your color ready on your brush and you apply it on your canvas there is some type of color mixing happening there as well it can be wet on wet let's say you have like a yellow paint and you you cover it with blue paint there is going to be some type of wet on wet mixing happening right there or if you're painting wet on dry like you know you have all these techniques where you you layer colors on top of each other to get all types of color effects like glazing scumbling and all this stuff and all of this is part of what I call canvas mixing the colors can do various things on your canvas that you don't really control because of I have the transparency of the pigments the type of brush that you're using the type of gesture the angle that you're using it can all affect the way the colors appear on the canvas and it can be very different from what's happening on the palate so trying to predict everything is really difficult and it's true that with a lot of experience you sort of naturally understand that but as a beginner I was looking for a way to get immediate experience just to get started and this is when it clicked and I thought about this this strategy I call this the small simple strategy or 3 s's it's very simple and it works like this you do all your mixing on your palette as usual and once you are close enough you're going to take a small sample of this color and you're gonna try it directly on your canvas to see if it's right color and you observe compare and you adjust if necessary and you repeat until you have the right color all right so as I said this is a strategy this is not a tip or a trick this is a strategy and as any strategy you need to be aware of the risks and you need to have a back-up plan and to prove to you that the risks are really worth the reward of getting better control over your colors I'm gonna demonstrate with this painting that I consider it well to be pretty much finished and it's it's completely dry so it's not gonna apply to really wet on wet but I'm gonna talk about how you can do that also wet on wet all right I'm gonna let's say that I want to I don't know make this part right here a little bit more blue cyan like here to sort of indicate that there are a little bit more reflected lights coming from this side of the room and in hitting this part of the of the face well this let's say that I want to do that I have my palette here and the good thing about this strategy is that all the tips and tricks that you had for palette mixing they still apply so I would just mix my my colors as I usually do and and just try to get the color like that in my head would work for this part so I'm gonna mix my colors I'm gonna take a little bit of cobalt teal blue just to have this nice cool tones and I'm gonna try you know the color checking strategy mmm okay maybe just touch more all right do I really want to put the simple right here I don't know maybe I'll try you can try a part that's free almost not noticeable so maybe right here on the fingers yeah see I don't know like doesn't make huge difference like I said small simple strategy not happy with it well this is dry paint this this paint is really really touched dry because it's a it's an old painting so yeah it's not gonna be noticeable if you still notice some some traces well just just add a little bit like yeah you might see like a trace of a slightly cooler shade so just add a little bit of red or a deser in and and just just add a little bit and and cover your damage okay will this work here I don't know let's try let's not try right in the middle let's try just here Wow way too light so I'm gonna go back to my palette and change things make it darker of course because I now have indication that my mixture needs to go darker so I want to cover it all right like this one this simple works see it works better it's like more it feels more natural with the rest of the skin so you can still see a difference but I want to make it slightly bluer to sort of make this warm and cool effect more pronounced now I can take a bigger brush and just just spread it a little bit and use the transparency so there is an effect of transparency right here because I'm not applying a lot of paint so this would be very hard to control like just out of my head to predict the result of this transparency effect if I didn't have the direct experience of this small color samples I wouldn't be really capable of predicting all this if your painting wet on wet this is going to be different but you can still do the small samples here and there but wet-on-wet is going to be more - more direct more you know you need to have this add a pre-med touch so you're going to use a lot more paint so it's a little bit more risky but you can always like take a palette knife and just remove some of the paint that you don't want and just you cover it up again I mean nothing can go so wrong with oil painting that you can't fix if you really mess things up well there's always the option of letting it dry and do what I just did so well the you're very flexible with your approach because oil painting is a very versatile medium first do as much as possible on your palette first and try to get as close as possible to your your color the color that you want to create on the palette first use all the strategies that you have for a palette mixing this still applies next you want to well use a small sample on a part that's not really noticeable and of course you also have the control Z option which will help you undo things well no I think this strategy is worth trying many artists actually do that spontaneously you don't call this a strategy I just found that once I put words on it it helped me just conceptualize as a proved to me that well you cannot make things worse than having bad colors so if this strategy can at least help you get better colors on your hanging well it's worth trying alright that's what helped me as a beginner so I hope that it can help you as well if you have any tips you can share them in the comments below if you want to be updated on the advancement of my future course on color theory you can follow me on Instagram thank you to all my patrons on patreon your support really means a lot to me thank you for watching this video thank you for liking and subscribing I'll see you for the next video until then have fun painting bye [Music] you

Channel: Florent Farges - arts

Views: 56,127

Rating: 4.9189582 out of 5

Keywords: oil painting, painting, paint, classical art, atelier, art, arts, techniques, tutorial, how to, beginner, oil paint, drawing

Id: gGTgqATmcBk

Length: 12min 0sec (720 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 08 2020