Feature Article on Color Harmony

Feature Article on Color Harmony

I am happy to share with you a feature article I wrote for the UK magazine The Artist. The article is for painting geeks and is entitled, “Color Harmony in the Split Primary Palette.”

What that means is how to use a simple palette of just 6 primary colors to create harmony in your paintings. It may seem complicated, but the easiest way to think about it is to look for similar colors overall and tie them together in your painting.

The reason why this is so important is that it creates a natural sense of light and place, keeping the sense of the same light washing over the entire scene you are painting.

I will share a few excerpts here with you and you can read the full article with pictures here

The article begins with a simple discussion of the colors I use on my palette. I have written a blog post on this in the past.

I use a warm and cool of each primary color plus white and often times a brown transparent oxide for deep transparent shadows (and for toning my canvas before beginning to paint).

After years of experimenting with variations on this, I have settled on (for now) the following colors
Titanium White
Lemon Yellow
Cadmium Yellow Light
Cadmium Red Light
Deep Madder Lake
French Ultramarine Blue
Prussian Blue
Transparent Oxide Brown

I also say how important it is to keep your palette organized! Yes, I know, that is so boring for an artist. But really! Be messy elsewhere, but keep your palette under control so that you know where you are going with your colors.

I tend to keep all of my dark, middle and light mixtures separate on my palette and keep a few brushes that are only used with light, dark and middle values so that I don’t get them mixed up and end up with a middle value in my painting.

In The Artist Magazine they like you to pick a painting to demonstrate the topic you are talking about, so I chose a small painting done on a spring morning here in Rome.

This is a great example in my mind of creating color harmony, using this soft pink and blue light everywhere to express the feeling of morning.

Here I show my palette mixtures and one quick way to achieve color/light harmony is to pre mix a few pastel colors, like a light blue with white and a light pink with red and white that I leave on the edge of my palette and mix them in to the other colors as I go so that they permeate all of my mixtures.

The final part of the article talks about tying it all together. Look for places where you can bring colors together by mixing one into another. Look for any places that jump out as not belonging to the rest of the scene in temperature, color or value. Look to repeat colors to keep the eye moving around the canvas.

This is a synopsis and never will there be a substitute for just getting your hands dirty and getting down to work to discover how to do this for ourselves. As we all know, just about anything in painting is easier said than done!