Dec, 7: Color and Light-Paint and Pigments Chapter 5, pgs 96-99, 104-107

Warm Underpainting/imprimatura:

 An insistent warm underpainting will force you to cover the entire background with opaques.
- You can paint a series of underpaintings before the session so they are dry and then prime them with oil priming. This allows the new paint to sort of float on the surface so that they don't mix with what is underneath.


This helps to unify the piece.

SKY PANELS:

Similar to an underpainting this is a canvas with a sky painted on it before the actual painting so that the lines separating the sky from everything else stay crisp.
Alla Prima-Starting with a blank canvas and completing the entire statement in one session. (How it should be done)

-When using a pre-painted canvas you should oil-it-out so that it takes new paint well.
-This also keeps the base coat from lifting off.

If you don't remember or cannot anticipate which colors to use for the gradation, spend . a couple sessions just painting a variety of clear skies from observation and keep those color notes for future panels.
Limited Palettes:
Go on a color diet to keep your colors lean and strong

Limited palattes result in a more harmonious painting. Here are two examples: one good and one bad. Can you tell the difference?











Limited palettes:
1. Are more harmonious
2. Force you out of color mixing habits
3. are compact, portable and sufficient for almost any subject.

The Mud Debate:
Is there such a thing as a muddy color? There are two very different schools of thought on this issue.

The “Beware of Mud” School
Some oil painters are wary of overmixing colors to avoid colors that look “dead” or “dirty.”

Virgil Elliott, in his popular new book Traditional Oil Painting writes, 

“a clearer color sensation is possible with a single pigment than with any mixture of two or more.”

Daniel Parkhurst, a student of Bouguereau, said in his 1903 book, The Painter in Oil, 

“Over-mixing makes color muddy sometimes, especially when more than three colors are used. When you don't get the right tint with three colors, the chances are that you have got the wrong three. If that is not so, and you must add a fourth, do so with some thoughtfulness, or you will have to mix the tint again.”
Partially mixed colors, he says, are more apt to yield harmonious variations in the final painting. He goes on to recommend that the artist keep the palette scrupulously clean and use a lot of brushes.

-Too many colors=mud
-Teachers say that art students tend to use browns or black habitually for toning or graying color. 
- They recommend using only pure primaries as the only source colors, especially when learning to mix colors.
- The primaries could be warm and cool variations of blue, yellow, and red, plus white.

The “Mud is a Myth” School :
On the other hand, there’s a group of equally sensitive colorists arguing that there’s no such thing as a muddy color mixture. There are only muddy relationships of color in a given composition. Grays are the artist’s best friend. A given color either works in its pictorial context or not. The effect of drabness or dullness, they would argue, comes from poor value organization more than from bad mixtures or bad mixing practices.

-As Richard Schmid puts it in Alla Prima: Everything I Know about Painting, 

“There are no ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’ colors. ‘Muddy’ colors are simply mixtures that are the inappropriate relative temperature for the area in which they are placed.”

-Kevin MacPherson, in his book Oil Painting Inside and Out, recommends scraping up unused paint on the palette, stirring it together, and putting it into empty paint tubes that he actually labels 

“MUD.” He uses these tubes of gray instead of white for mixing a medium value color. “These grays are in harmony with your primaries,” he writes, “since they are a mixture of all of them, and most of nature is made of grays.”

-A given color can be mixed from many different constituent colors. A neutral gray can be blended from red and green, or from blue and orange, or from all the colors on the palette. It really doesn’t matter to the painting how you arrived at a given mixture.

-And you don’t necessarily have to wash your brush all the time or use a lot of different brushes unless the painting calls for saturated tints.
- A “dirty” brush is infused with unifying grays or browns (which some artists affectionately call “sauce”) that can help bind a painting together.



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