Learn to… Art!

Dot Painting: Pointillism in Colour

Apr 11, 2010 Colour Theory, Painting

Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I have a certain fondness for colour wheels!

Today’s article is all about pointillism in colour, or painting with dots. I’m teaching a workshop on this topic today and thought it would make an excellent topic for a blog post.

I’ve talked about shading with pointillism in pen, but stippling in colour is a whole other ball game! The pioneer of this technique was Seurat, a French painter of the 1800’s. It involves placing dots of colour next to each other and on top of each other, relying on optical blending to create new hues.

If you blur your eyes slightly and take a look at my colour wheel, we can see the three primary colours and the three secondary colours. When you look closer, you can see that the secondary colours are actually the result of primary colours placed next to each other. The green, for example, isn’t green paint: it is overlapping dots of yellow and blue.

This is the optical illusion. Our eye combines the colours and we perceive it as being green. The colour wheel is a crude example, but this is even more evident in newspapers. The next time you see a colour picture in the paper, look closer. What you’ll see is tiny little dots of colour on top of each other. When newspaper is printed, it is printed with only red, yellow, blue and black ink in varying proportions. The dots are so tiny that our eye blends them together and we see a myriad of other colours!

This is exactly what Seurat has done in his paintings. From far away, they simply look textured. Up close, you can see the hundreds of dots that make up each painting.

How to Use this Technique

Stippling can be done with a small round brush with short bristles. You can also use q-tips, as I’ve done in these examples. Pointillism is a time-consuming technique, whether you’re using pen or paint. The results can be very rewarding, though! You can achieve a sense of light and luminosity through painting dots, and you can also create a painting with a rich variety of colours.

In the painting below, I used only the primaries and white, but don’t limit yourself! You can experiment with mixing other colours to stipple with. Try placing high intensity hues next to low intensity hues, create contrast in values. Remember also to take advantage of the freedom that pointillism allows: that blue object doesn’t have to be onlyblue, you can throw in some spots of red to add to the visual interest.

Have you painted with pointillism? If so, I’d love to see your results! Feel free to post a comment with your link!

Tags: acrylic painting, colour mixing, Colour Theory, paintings

Exploring Warm and Cool Colours

Mar 14, 2010 Colour Theory

We touched on warm and cool colours a little bit when we talked about colour theory, but let’s go into more detail.

It’s really important to understand the difference between warm and cool colours and how you can use them. In general, the warm colours are reds, yellows, and oranges. These colours are bright and energetic, fiery and passionate. The cool colours include the blues, greens, and violets. These are calm and soothing, more mellow and relaxing.

The colours you use in your paintings will have a huge impact on the overall feeling of your work. At Lori McNee’s blog, Fine Art Tips, she discusses how to use the hidden meaning of colour.

Although a red is always warmer than a blue, reds can be different temperatures in relation to each other. When looking at the temperatures of the same hue, it’s all relative. A cadmium red, for example is closer to orange and therefore warmer than an alizarin crimson, which is closer to blue. A cadmium yellow is a warm yellow, and a hansa yellow is a cool yellow.

This is good to keep in mind when mixing secondary colours. If you want to mix a pure orange, you will want to use two primaries that are already warm: cadmium red and cadmium yellow. If you want an orange that is less intense (more grayed) you might use a hansa yellow or an alizarin crimson. You will need to experiment with these combinations to find the colour that you’re looking for.

Warm and cool colours can also be used to depict depth. Cool colours have a tendency to recede on the picture plane; they fall back and appear farther away. Warm colours come forward and appear closer. Keep this in mind as you’re painting and see how you can achieve a greater illusion of depth.

Warm and Cool Colours in Action

Borbay is a New York location artist who, through his collaged paintings, effectively uses the properties of warm and cool colours. Take a look at the documentation of his painting process. You can see how he begins with a sketch, then covers the entire canvas in collaged elements. As he lays in the blues of the background, it appears to fall back. Then he starts working red and orange into the foreground and you can actually see the building jump forward. Don’t forget to peruse the rest of his work; blue and orange feature dominantly in most of his paintings!

Tags: Colour Theory, paintings

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