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Understanding Color

(This is still a draft...)

Painting can be divided into three steps. To quote Richard Schmid:

"I know this simple fact--when painting from life, all I have to do is correctly identify a color I see in my subject as a specific pigment or mixture of pigments, and then put that on my canvas in the right place. Nothing more--see it right--mix what I see right--and then stick it where it belongs." --Richard Schmid, Alla Prima, page 119.

Seeing It Right

To understand what it is that you're seeing you first have to understand how light behaves. The key concepts here are temperature, hue and value. Temperature is how cold or warm the color is. The "warmness" or "coldness" of color is a relative quantity. A green color can be cool next to yellow but warm next to blue.

You can dig quite deeply into the subject. There are three rules that as far as I know generally hold true. They are:

  1. If the light source is warm, then the shadows will be cool, and if the light source is cool, then the shadows will be warm.
  2. It doesn't matter how warm or how cool you paint any particular spot, but only that the relation between the parts be correct. That is, you only have to get the degree of warmth right in one spot in relation to the degree of warmth in all the other spots. Whether it's right in absolute terms doesn't really matter. More so, getting it right in absolute terms is sometimes impossible because of the limitations of our pigments.
  3. The warmth of any given spot is given by a combination of three factors: the pigment it's made of, the light source that's illuminating it and the pigment of whatever is surrounding it. A candle light will make everything look yellower or warmer (but the shadows cooler. See 1) and if you wear a red shirt your face will seem warmer, or redder. 

Regarding (2), I'll quote Richard Schmid again (his book, Alla Prima, is amazing by the way):

"To sum this upp--we must see the RELATIONSHIP between colors, the relative visual warmth or coldness of colors to one another in a complex visual field of many colors. The question to be asked in all cases is not what color something is, but rather what color it is COMPARED TO ALL OTHERS AROUND IT." --Richard Schmid, Alla Prima, page 121.

Mixing It Right

To mix it right you have to master your materials. A good excercise for this is doing color charts. Write down what you mixed for each color. Then use your charts as a reference while painting.

Putting It In The Right Place

Getting the pigments mixture correct won't do you much good if you can't put it in the right place. To do that you have to take measurements. Measure what you about to paint against what is already painted. If your first measurements are right everything will fall into place. If they are wrong it won't. The first few steps are the hardest since you have nothing to verify against.

Capture the 'envelope' (basically, the envelope is the outer contour of your subject captured in five to six lines) first.

Know your subject. If you're drawing the human figure, know the anatomical landmarks. Know the skeleton. You should be able to draw the front, back and side views from memory. Preferably the 2/3's view, too. Memorize the main muscles. Or if you're drawing a flower, knowledge of botany won't hurt. See Leonardo Da Vinci's studies to get what I'm talking about. You can go as deep as you want or need. And even deeper if you're curious. And you better be if you want to paint well.

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