The Magic of Color Mixing. The Zorn Palette. Color Theory. Open Studio.

hi i'm cesar santos welcome to my open studio today i'm painting i'm talking about my flesh colors the colors i use to paint skin tones i'm going to show you how i mix those and how from the zorn palette which is a very limited palette of four colors you can create such a variety of tints and shades [Music] this palette that i'll be playing with in front of you are the colors that i use to paint my figures the base of this color palette comes from ancient greece it's a classical limited palette mentioned in plining's book and also more famously known by the sworn palette it's basically black white red and yellow and the variety of colors for the flesh that we can create from there are countless let me do a little trick and play around hopefully you get used to doing this type of testing before painting before doing any project sit down experiment with your tools get your colors mix them up compare that's how you become a painter is by knowing what you play with what you have your range within your tools this is just one continuous segment from my instructional videos on my website cesarsantos.com in that particular class i go and paint examples and demonstrate mixing my flesh colors how to get a variation of colors specifically skin colors check it out [Music] okay the whole palette is set i can bring the sworn palette the limited palette into the middle here and just to show you something interesting i'm going to put the white [Music] i'm gonna bring a little bit of this [Music] yellow ochre pail [Music] cadmium red and ivory black these colors are now the limited palette or the or similar to the sorn palette actually those colors come from plini's book from ancient greece i will try to mix colors from here to replace all these colors in fact you can get used to these colors and not use anything else maybe other than some strong blues or something like that that we cannot reach with only these colors but let's practice and see if we can make a little bit of romper and all these other colors with the limited palette the reason i put all these colors here is because we will use them but sometimes we feel overwhelmed if we don't understand what all these colors mean and that's what i'm gonna explain to you and how can we add them to this beautiful combination of just four colors for example light red this color is going to be the base for the flesh color meaning that just a little bit of white and a touch of that light red that light red is very strong so make sure that you only use a tiny bit when you come to use that color otherwise it's too overwhelming and too warm but you see just how quickly we created a general light complexion just with light red and white we can achieve that color by getting some white a touch of this red is gonna be too high chroma to pink but we got a little the yellow and then more white and get a very similar color than the light red this means that yes you don't have to use this one here you can just mix it but we went to several steps to get the same color that we got with only one step let's see if we can make something similar to this raw umber for example when you add white to any color you're going to see the real intention like the tendency of that color raw umber with white gives you this kind of warm gray [Music] let's try to mix this raw umber color since this is a dark color i'm going to bring the black put it here [Music] tiny bit of yellow [Music] i touched it with some red [Music] i don't want to use too much red because i don't want it to go to the feeling of the burnt umber just a raw [Music] this color is similar to that raw umber add more red and you can play with this make sure you sit down and play with these colors before painting so you can get used to what these colors can do [Music] and in time you will be able to control them as soon as you see something in an image you can just come and pick it pick it up so let's say if i mix this color with a tiny bit of white [Music] we can see a little bit warmer than that but if we keep adjusting it we'll be able to maybe get it same by getting some of the black and making it cooler [Music] you see how i created the same impression of raw umber just with this limited palette here not touching the raw umber itself and create a very similar color if we think of the same let's try to mix the feeling that this burnt umber can give you see how it's starting to be more red [Music] let's try to get that color just with this limited palette again since it's a dark color i'm gonna start bringing in some of the black i'm gonna do it here well these are all the same colors so i'm missing some black from here i'll steal it from here it's the same okay so we have this we're gonna add red and yellow and that's pretty similar to this burnt umber now to test this color because it's pretty dark to test that color i'm going to mix it with white and see if i get the same color effect [Music] maybe i was missing a little red this color is warmer than this so it looks more like the difference between these two so burnt umber raw umber and i have replaced it just by combining this in a different manner we have tested these colors this red is the same so we don't have to you know test it as the same color now we have green so i'm going to take this green umber add some white to it and create this kind of green tint that's just the green and the white let's try to make that with only my limited palette again this is a great exercise so feel free to have fun with this stuff and you can combine it in different ways too so i'm gonna put the yellow ochre here bring [Music] some of this black which i just put a little but [Music] so now in tone this looks pretty similar to the to the green number i'm and i just mix the black and the yellow now if i add white to that you'll see how it gets gray so we're gonna have to struggle because this has no green but we can struggle in a way that we can make it look a little bit more intense by adding more yellow to the combination so it's going to be a different type of green [Music] as soon as we start mixing more into into the cools we're gonna have a harder time i'm gonna get the white okay and black and see if we can get that cool color [Music] and this plus this might give you a similar color as the mixture of this so you see how we can get closer this is a very cool green in order to get the coolness we just added more black and white to the mixture of the yellow and the black and we can get some of this yellow again and mix it up in here and try to see how we can combine it together closer to that this is a limited palette if we could make all the colors with this there will be no reason to get all that so of course the virgin tints up here can increase the intensity of the color there's no way we can mix this blue because just to test it it's going to be very bright so this is going to be extremely blue but we don't have anything similar to this blue on the flesh so we don't have to worry about this type of blue but that's why we have it here in case we need it but we don't want to use it too fast the coolest color and the bluest color that we can achieve with the limited palette is just the white and ivory black [Music] it's not as blue as that but it's pretty blue for what we have here imagine just white yellow red and black and we can make this bluish color by mixing white and ivory black but if you need more intensity of blue then you can pick up the ultramarine now this indian red if we get a lot of this canyon red okay i'm gonna actually get it from here because it's more more quantity here okay so i get a lot of this and a touch of the ivory black i went too much but we can get more red [Music] now you can see that we have something similar to that indian red we have an intense red that can be really nice for shadows something dark so this is just by using canon red and ivory black we're gonna clean this let's try to mix some white into this red see what it does it gives you this purpley color it's kind of cool red and as soon as we get the same white and add it to this mixture we get something similar [Music] okay so you see how the whole palette here has become more powerful now because just with the white the yellow the canyon red and the ivory black which i have placed here i can mimic i can create the illusion of all these colors now that we have described and talked about these colors and how they react with one another i'm going to clean the palette up and explain how flesh color is achieved and the principle within the flesh color i'm using mineral spirits to clean this so that's something you want to have handy too is a jar with mineral spirits odourless mineral spirits [Music] to continue with this class go to my website cesantos.com sign in and you can add any videos you want to your collection [Music]

Channel: Cesar Santos

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Rating: 4.9522805 out of 5

Keywords: Cesar santos, santocesart, art, oil painting, painting, realism, artist, contemporary, portrait, syncretism, Miami, cuba, American, Cuban, Cuban American, winsor and newton, old Holland, mussini, florida, instructional, how to paint, theory, how to, ideas, classical, master, old, new, talking about art, vlog, fine art, colors, America, usa, artista, face, figure, arte, drawing, firenze, florence, instructional video, zorn palette, limited, skin

Id: _tfVg_TKsms

Length: 14min 40sec (880 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 20 2021