Artist insight
Fine artist Charlie Pickard reveals his top tips for creating more accurate colour mixes in your traditional paintings
Colour is one of the most fascinating elements of painting, to the layman and the professional alike. It’s not uncommon to hear people talk of colour when they describe their favourite works of art and this speaks to the expressive powers that it holds to us. It’s often the most direct access we have to our audience’s emotions in the visual mediums.
Due to this, an accurate and powerful control over this quality is an asset to any visual designer. The first step on this journey is getting an accurate understanding of how to reproduce colours. But this is often an incredibly confusing, challenging task for a student who’s just starting out. Colours seem inaccessible when we try to mix them.
Even beyond this, we often lack the simple language to accurately describe how one is different from another. This becomes increasingly obvious the more accurate we get with our mixtures.
This article explores some of the most powerful ideas I’ve come across teaching classical figure painting for the last decade, addressing common errors I see from beginners. If we can understand these basic ideas, then we can transform our understanding and get control over colour mixtures!
1 THE THREE QUALITIES OF COLOUR
The first element we want to establish is a clear idea of the language we use when we describe a colour. For this purpose, I believe the most complete and accurate way is via the Munsell colour system.
Albert Henry Munsell was a 19th-century colour theorist and artist who developed the Munsell colour system. It conceives of colour as consisting of three separate qualities, these are:
• Value: The lightness or darkness of a colour; the most important quality for realism.
• Hue: The colour’s position on the rainbow. Is it more blue, or more red?
• Chroma: The purity or intensity of the colour, or it’s distance from a neutral grey.
These may seem obvious to those working digitally as Photoshop has adopted a Hue/Value/ Saturation slider, though the latter is actually slightly different from chroma. This language will serve us well to truly understand and describe colour.
