Laying out your colour palette
Whether an artist is specialising in pet portraits, landscapes, or traditional portraits, keeping colours as pure as possible is an important part of producing paintings that look fresh an clean.
The way in which any colour appears is dependant on the context in which it is seen. The way a colour is seen is effected by the colours next to it and on which it is placed. For instance, yellow will seem washed out and pale next to white, but strong and bright next to black. Colour also has tone and can be attributed to groups. Lemon yellows, golden yellows, oranges and yellow earth colours can be subsituted for each other in mixtures or used to shade the others when illustrating form. Also, many colours will have an undertone, meaning that they have an element of another colour in their make-up. For instance, red may range from having pronounced yellow undertones to blue.
Laying out your palette
First off, the artist should invariably consider the permanence of his or her colours and restrict these to as few as possible, and avoid adding colours that are very similar. Laying out your palette properly is important, as it’ll make the whole painting process easier. Messy palettes, where colours contaminate each other, muddying their appearance and hence, the appearance of the painting. For complicated techniques, that require several stages, it is better to set out a palette for each stage of the process. The aim is to have colours placed far enough away from each other so that they do not get contaminated plus, the area where you mix these colours, should also be kept away from the original colours so that you keep them as bright as possible. Best practice for colour placement, is to place them in order of importance along the top of the palette, so that the most used colours are within easy reach. White is usually placed nearest the thumb (in the ‘top’ spot as it were), but some artists like to have the white in the centre of the line. If specific colour mixes or shades are anticipated, these can be laid out in lines under the principal colours.
Colour mixing
The permanence of colour is reduced when mixed, some colours can become very impermanent if diluted too much. Indeed, when mixing colours, you should keep the amount used to just two or three, this will avoid colours getting too muddy. All the same, you need to be aware that many commercial colours are already a mix of different pigments, so will be more likely to produce muddy colours if over mixed. Brighter tones can be achieved without the loss of colour saturation by mixing with sympathetic colours.
Tags: art, artist, colour palette, colours, pet portraits
