Color, color, color! Oh, the joy of painting color!
January 29, 2019
Half way through a painting I started at the end of last year, I knew my color was off. The piece lacked life. It was too muted. I had been envisioning a bright, vibrant painting. This one had no energy. It was missing the vivid color that I love and strive for. For a designer who loves color, this was frustrating and HAD to be fixed. And stat!
After mixing all my blues and yellows trying to achieve a particular aqua hue that was completely alluding me, I wondered if this color simply wasn’t achievable in paint… Did I need new colors? Was this color physically impossible to achieve? After all, I’ve been working with colors on screens for 25 years. Real life paint and screen colors are not the same. Further exploration was a must!
Initial research on color swatches led me to a great article written on this exact subject! How I Learned About Color Mixing, by Julia Lundman — a great primer in color mixing. She led me to Richard Schmid’s book, Alla Prima. And this is where I found the answer to fixing my color mixing crisis! Voila! A dive deep into color and a hands-on study of color mixing—the perfect exercise to help me improve my understanding of physical pigments and mature my color skills.
Thus began my first major project as a painter. I embarked on a huge project of meticulously mixing a comprehensive set of colors which will eventually result in hundreds of color swatches. 800+ swatches.
The nitty gritty on making Richard Schmid’s Color Swatches
Now that I had my color swatch project identified, I needed details. I’d not yet read Richard Schmid’s book on color, Alla Prima, but my plan was to learn his process through other means.
I was delighted to stumble across Pat Fiorello’s blog where she describes her own journey and details in making her own swatches based on Schmid’s technique.
The first step was selecting 12 colors to work with. This was not an easy process, as I wanted to work with a set of colors I’m most likely use in my work.
I already had a full palette that I’d worked with over the past few years, which was recommended by my painting mentor, Larry Smith, a fantastic colorist.
Plus, knowing that I love the color used by the Impressionist painters, I had a palette suggested in Paint with the Impressionists, by Jonathan Stephenson.
And, there’s the palette Julia Lundman worked with.
All these were also different from the palette Pat Fiorello worked with.
All of a sudden there were about 25 colors possible which had to be edited down to 12! You see the difficulty here! Yikes! The project required only 12 colors to keep it manageable (780 colors). Following my meticulous nature, I made a comprehensive spreadsheet listing everyone’s colors. From there I edited it down to my final list….
Cadmium Lemon
Cadmium Yellow Light
Yellow Deep
Yellow Ochre Pale
Cadmium Red
Permanent Rose
Alizarin Crimson
Emerald
Viridian
Phthalo Green (Yellow Shade)
Cerulean Blue
Cobalt Blue
French Ultramarine
And so I began my long trek to better color.