Learn to… Art!

An Introduction to Colour Theory

Feb 28, 2010 Colour Theory

Colour. It’s such a huge topic that I’m not even sure where to start!

So far we’ve focused on learning basic drawing skills, which are essential to most visual art forms. Look at any accomplished painter. Beneath the pigment is a solid understanding of shape, form, line, and values.

Learn to… Art! will continue to build on those drawing skills, but I am also going to expand the blog’s focus to include colour theory and painting.

The beauty of colour is that it adds another layer, another dimensin to your work. Colour can portray emotion, mood, atmosphere, and depth.

But colour can be mysterious and intimidating, especially for an artist who is used to black and white. The best thing you can do is to jump right in and start experimenting! Student sets of paints, pastels, and coloured pencils are a great way to get your feet wet and discover what you like.

Let’s look at a few basics to introduce you to colour theory.

Important Colour Terms

When talking about different kinds of colours, it can get a bit confusing. Here are a few of the most important terms.Visit Wetcanvas for a more complete art glossary.

chroma – The relative intensity or purity of a colour. A colour with low chroma is closer to gray; a colour with high chroma would be seen as luminous or intense. Saturation is a related term.

hue – The basic colour name - blue, green, red etc.

intensity – The brilliance of a color.

local color – The color of an object in daylight. The true color, without interpretation or embellishment.

neutral - Strictly, an achromatic color, a neutral gray, white or black. In common usage with painters, the term is used more loosely to describe any of a range of low-chroma colors, near-grays, including browns.

saturation – A similar term to chroma but not exactly synonymous. More correctly it means the amount of colour in relation to its brightness.

shade - A color mixed with black.

subdue - To make less intense. Often used in discussions of color, where a complementary color or gray might be added to lower the chroma.

tint - A color mixed with white. It can also refer to the shift in hue when one color is added to another, for example red tints yellow towards orange. See also shade.

value - The relative lightness or darkness of a color. High value is closer to white, low value is closer to black.

The Colour Wheel

Most of you are probably familiar with the colour wheel, but we’ll talk about it quickly. The colour wheel is a diagram that shows how colours relate to each other.Some colour wheels are quite simple while others are more complex. Knowing the colours and their respective place on the wheel can help us make decisions when it comes to choosing our palette. The three types of colours represented in the colour wheel are primaries, secondaries and tertiaries.

primary color - The three colors from which all other colors can theoretically be mixed. Red, yellow and blue.

binary (secondary) colors – A color made by mixing two of the primary colors. Examples include green, orange, and purple.

intermediate (tertiary) colors – Made by mixing unequal amounts of primary colors. Between the primary and secondary colors on a color wheel. Examples include red-orange and yellow-green.

 The colour wheel can also be useful when it comes to choosing colour combinations like which colours look good together and how colours can be mixed. Here are some colour combinations represented on the wheel.

analogous colors - Any two or more colors adjacent to each other on the color wheel. Can be considered families of colors e.g. the “warm” colors red, orange, yellow, and the “cool” colors green, blue, violet.

complementary colors – Visually, complements are the colours directly opposite one another on the colour wheel, e.g. magenta and green. In paints, the colour or colors that mix with another to form a neutral gray; these two colours are called a complementary pair

split complements - For a given color, the two others that are immediately adjacent to the opposite color on a color wheel. For example, the split complements of green are crimson and red-violet.

Warm vs. Cool Colours

To further complicate matters, colours are divided into two groups: warm and cool. Warm colours include the reds, oranges and yellows. Cool colours are the blues, greens and violets.

This is important to remember when it comes to mixing colours. For example, you can get two types of red paint: cadmium and alizarin. Cadmium red is a warm red, with more yellow in it while alizarin crimson is cool with more blue. If you want to mix a purple, you need to use the red that is already cool. If you tried to make purple using cadmium red, you would end up with a muddy version of purple.

Colour temperature is also useful when it comes to depth. Visually, warm colours come forward and cool colours fall back. To create depth in your work, the closer something is to a viewer, the warmer in temperature it should be.

If you’re interested in exploring colour, the best thing you can do is start messing around and see what happens. I’d love to hear about your experiences!

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Tags: Colour Theory, colour wheel

Recognize Your Accomplishments

Feb 24, 2010 Art General, Creativity

I’ve been sick for the past couple of days. First it was a sore throat, then a cough, and now sinus congestion. Not fun!

Because I’ve generally felt like crap, I’ve had to put a few of my projects on hold for a little while so that I can rest up. Which annoys me.

I, and many other artists, put a lot of pressure on myself. To produce work, to research, to learn, to blog, to network, to teach, to market. It’s overwhelming and exhausting. At any one time, I might be working on ten different projects, with another thirty floating around somewhere in my brain. Maybe I’ll get to them tomorrow, maybe in five years, maybe never. Either way, there is always a feeling of having not enough time to do everything I want to do.

Any time taken away from the pursuit of art is a frustration. It’s an opportunity that might be missed or an idea that may never come to fruition.

Whenever I feel this kind of pressure building up, I try to remind myself of all the things I’ve already done.

It’s easy to become overwhelmed and frustrated. It’s easy to focus on all the things we have yet to accomplish. And it’s easy to compare ourselves to those we see as more successful. But what about the things you’ve already done? Have you given yourself enough credit for those things?

No matter where you are in your art journey, you have accomplished something. For many people, the decision to pursue art is a major accomplishment in itself!

Take some time to think about the things you have done and what they mean in your life. Don’t compare yourself to anyone else, just focus on yourself.

• What obstacles have you overcome?
• What challenges have you faced?
• What are your successes?
• What do you feel proud of?

Before you turn your attention back to all your future projects, give yourself a pat on the back for all the things you’ve already accomplished!

Tags: Creativity, motivation

Drawing with Charcoal

Feb 21, 2010 Drawing

If the pencil is sturdy, reliable and precise, charcoal is like its wild counterpart: bold, daring and dramatic. Blacker than any pencil and rich in texture, drawing with charcoal is an altogether different experience.

Don’t get me wrong: charcoal is a versatile medium and you can achieve extremely sensitive, realistic drawings using it. There is just something about taking up that messy stump of charcoal that frees us to get big, expressive and gestural.

Types of Charcoal

Charcoal comes in a few different forms. You can get pressed charcoal that comes as a compressed stick. These can be hard, producing a grayer shade, or soft and very deep black. The softer the charcoal, the easier it will be to smudge. This is the kind of charcoal that will get your hands, your paper, and quite possibly your clothing and face dirty.

This pressed charcoal also comes in pencil form. This can be useful for detailed drawings because you can sharpen it to a fine point. It’s also much less messy!

A third type of charcoal is willow or vine charcoal. This comes in the form of an actual branch: it’s long, cylindrical and wiggly. Willow charcoal is very soft and produces a delicious dove grey. It has one of the nicest textures to draw with, but is also very smudgy.

Why Charcoal?

Charcoal functions in much the same way as a pencil. You can draw, shade and blend. But there’s something psychologically different about using charcoal. It allows you to get more expressive and work bigger without getting caught up in the details. Charcoal sticks especially, because they don’t have a fine point, can force you to focus on large shapes and general contours.

 What to Draw

You can draw and shade anything in charcoal the same way you would a pencil. Charcoal also lends itself well to more expressive types of shading like hatching.

My favorite thing to do with charcoal, though, is gesture drawings. Charcoal is perfect for making the large, sweeping strokes needed to capture a gesture.

It’s always nice to have a variety of drawing tools to choose from. The pencil is perfect for detailed renderings, but when it comes to expressive drawings I always reach for the charcoal!

Please share your experiences! Do you prefer pencil or charcoal? Does it depend on what you’re drawing?

Tags: charcoal, drawing tips, tools

No Compromise!

Feb 17, 2010 Art General

When it comes to our art practice, it’s easy to make excuses. Do any of these sound familiar?

• It’s too expensive.
• I don’t have room to store it.
• No one would ever buy it.
• I don’t have the right materials.
• I wouldn’t know where to start.
• I don’t know how to do it.

I remember an exchange I had with one of my professors in University. I was just starting to explore abstraction in painting and wanted to add some kind of linear element to my work. I really wanted to use oil sticks but didn’t have any, so I was going to use paint. My prof just looked at me and said, “if you want to use oil sticks, then use oil sticks!”

Duh!

I’d been compromising my creativity, making excuses. I didn’t have oil sticks, I didn’t want to spend the money to get them, and mostly I was too lazy to do the two hour bus excursion to go get them.  I was willing to sacrifice my art for convenience.

That moment has stuck with me ever since.

You should never compromise your art practice for convenience. Obviously, we all need to work within boundaries that are practical for us, but that doesn’t mean always doing what is easiest.

The most common compromises seem to be about size, money, sales and skills.

Go Big

If you want to work big, work as big as you can! Don’t worry about storage or whether or not anyone will buy it. You don’t make art to store it, or even to sell it. You make art to make it, so make it the way you want. Making big art can be a very liberating experience, especially if you’ve never tried it before.

The Money Issue

If you can’t afford it, maybe take a look at your finances and try and find other areas to cut back. Or take a few weeks or months to save up what you need. Most art supplies are infrequent expenses anyways. Once you purchase a set of paints, for example, you’ll only need to replenish as you run out. The first expense is usually the biggest.

Selling Point

As for selling… make the art first, then worry about finding an audience. I am a firm believer that there is a market for everything; it’s just a matter of finding that market.

Know-How

If you don’t know where to start, or don’t have the knowledge to do what you really want to do, my advice would be to jump right in! Take a course or a workshop, read a book or find some resources online. There is information everywhere that can help you learn new skills. Don’t let a lack of knowledge or skill limit your art. I’m a huge fan of trial and error. You’ll learn the most by playing around and making mistakes.

The bottom line? No compromise!

Do what you want to do, the way you want to do it. Don’t let yourself get away with making excuses. Your art practice will benefit and you might be surprised at your results!

Tags: art, art tips, Creativity

Digitally Fix Your Art Images

Feb 14, 2010 Art General, Promotion and Exhibition

So, you’ve followed all the tips for documenting your art, but you’ve still ended up with a less than perfect image. Don’t worry, it happens. Luckily, if you’re documenting using digital photography, you can use your computer to enhance your images.

The important thing to remember when doing this is to not get carried away. You want to get your image as close to the original as possible, not make it look better than the original! This works best when you have already done everything possible during the photo-taking, and then only have to make minor digital changes. In my experience, the more altering you do on the computer, the grainier your image can get. So remember: small changes!

As far as photo manipulation software goes, you can get as simple or as complicated as you want. Most computers come with basic software that allows you to adjust brightness, colour, contrast, etc. All I’m using is the Windows Live Photo Gallery and Microsoft Picture Manager. I’ve also used Corel Draw and the Gimp (a free download). A program like Photoshop isn’t really necessary for the kinds of change we’ll be doing.

Here is our first image, direct from the camera. The problems with this are that it is very gray, there’s too much space around the drawing, it’s not square to the frame, and it’s not quite grayscale.

Rotate

Our first course of action is to use the rotate option to make the edges of the drawing parallel to the edges of the picture frame.

Crop

Next, crop the image to the edge of the drawing. This is easiest, obviously, if you’re working with a square piece of art. Some pieces, like my  abstract paintings, have irregular edges. In this case, you’ll want to document your work against a plain, neutral background and crop to just outside the edge of the art.

Saturation

Saturation has to do with the intensity of colour. With a black and white drawing like this, the lighting can actually change the colour. I like to reduce the saturation to zero, making the drawing completely grayscale (no colour).

Brightness

The next thing we want to do is get the values closer to the original. In the actual drawing, the lightest areas of the dog’s fur actually show the white of the paper. You can see how dark and greyed this image is. The first part of this two-step process is to increase the brightness, making the fur lighter.

Contrast

Our last step is to increase the contrast. This will make the darks darker, and the lights even brighter. Contrast is the option to be most wary of, as it’s easy to get carried away (for me at least, because I love high contrast!). It also has the  most potential to ruin your image, so go slowly in small increments.

Now we have an image that is much more faithful to the original drawing. Instead of being dull and grey, there is a range of values from the white fur to the black eyes.

Size

I just want to quickly mention the size of your images. When storing your images for documentation, gallery exhibitions, and promotional use, keep them large. If you’re e-mailing your images or loading them onto your website, save a smaller version. Your site will load faster and you won’t overload people’s inboxes!

If you liked this article, take a minute to check out my entire series on gallery exhibition proposals, or sign up for the newsletter!

Tags: art tips, documentation, exhibitions, promotion