A Touch of Green

Seventy two colors with Viridian as the base.

Yes, I will complete my color charting project! Today, Viridian. Tomorrow Cadmium Red Medium. Know your palette. Don't try to mix a color that doesn't exist.  As the light changes, so the colors change. Advice from Schmid who stressed charting your palette. That last one dictated really working fast when out in plein air where the light changes every ten minutes or faster pending the time of day.

What continues to surprise me, as I work, is the varying degrees of saturation of the tube colors and how much, or how little, white is needed to match a value. On one of many breaks, (to keep myself sane), I took a walk into the woods. A touch of green, Viridian or otherwise, was hardly noticeable.  But look at the movement in those leafless limbs, an old sculptor's delight




Easter Woodscape.

Easter Woodscape, A Touch of Green.  You have to look hard.

 

Then the wild daffs!  Viiridian plus Yellow Ochre plus white, then Viridian with Ultramarine plus white.
There are no daffodils pictured. I picked them all to take home, evidence I had braved the wilds.

 

From the woods to our table., a lovey Spring display on Easter Sunday.

 My woods is a far cry from Seattle city life.

I'm the one in the new Stetson rain hat--just a reflection in a shop window. I was the only one who brought a camera.
 

 

Sexy Cobalt Blue

Figuring out just how much white to add to equalize the steps towards a tinted white is one of the biggest concerns when charting.  I had to go back into two mixes to make corrections and may go back into a couple more--cobalt blue with cobalt violet and cobalt blue with TRO. 

Sexy Cobalt Blue was chosen for chart three. As you can see the colors are deliciously rich.

Terra Rosa is chosen for chart four, next to come. There is a burning red in there, whereas Transparent Red Oxide leans towards orange.

Yellow Ochre was chart two. 

And chart one was the Tube colors Richard Schmid chose for his palette, which differed from mine by Viridian instead of Thalo Blue Green, Cobalt Violet instead of Dioxinine Purple, Cadmium Lemon yellow as the lightest yellow instead of ordinary, Cadmium yellow light with no green in it, and no Naples Yellow at all. Some color close to Naples showed up on the Yellow Ochre chart.  On this chart,  Cobalt Blue and Viridian offers a color close  to Cerulean Blue, but no cigar. Whether Cerulean remains on my shopping list is a question still to be answered when all the facts are in. That goes for Naples Yellow as well.

The three colors I chose to chart first make up the simplest palette that offers a range of colors that apply to a couple of paintings I have in progress.   When I finish the Terra Rosa chart, I'll know all I need to know to finish two of those paintings.  JD and My Guys however call for a Cadmium Red Medium Chart. So guess what I'll be doing after Terra Rosa. I am thoroughly enjoying the academic approach to color.  It allows me to plan and keeps me from getting carried away by intuition and a love for spontaneity, which are imperative to have, but only best when backed with solid information. 

NOTE:
After a couple of weeks doing this, I've learned:
Not only did I choose the wrong white for this project, but also the wrong oil medium.  Linseed is the slowest dryer. The Yellow Ochre chart is still wet to the touch. Gamblin Galkyd and Galkyd Lite dry within 24 to 30 hours.  The difference between them has to do with the texture of the finish. Galkyd flattens brushstrokes and will give an enamel like finish and is the fastest drying of the two.  This oil would have been appropriate for this project along with Gamlin Quick Dry Titanium White. When I bought my oils for my first portrait  two years ago, I had no idea when I chose to do it in oils there were so many things to consider.  Linseed oil, turpentine and tubes of paint had been my only supplies when I gave up this medium fifty years ago. Things have come a long way. Thanks to our demands and the grinders of paint. 

 

 

 

Yellow Ochre is Anything But Boring

                                   

  Curiosity is my middle name. It's a vital force. It keeps me searching, reaching, growing. This last week I chose to poke around with yellow ochre, the color an artist friend described as boring, lackluster and old fashioned.  Well, I'm an old fashioned gal. Yellow ochre has been on my palette from the get go when all I had for a "studio" was the make up desk in my bedroom full of chintz, carpeting and flowered taffeta bedspreads that thankfully didn't show the paint spots that sprayed everywhere as I danced and taught myself how to paint.

 

Yellow Ochre was my choice for chart two of the twelve chart project I've undertaken to better understand my oil colors. I want to know what's on my palette intimately and this one seemed like a good one to investigate first.

Yellow ochre out of the tube occupies the first square in the top row, left hand corner. All the other palette colors across in that row have been mixed with YO as the dominant. The lower rows are  five step gradations towards  white.  Some of the squares may look alike, but a close up look reveals a slight shift towards warm or cool--that might make all the difference between a color value sitting pretty or looking like mud. (Mud is any color value not in sinc, in harmony, with the others around it. It's not that gray you get when you mix all the colors together to find a common denominator to pull the painting together--the gray way to harmonize color). 

As I sat and patiently mixed yellow ochre with each of the other colors on the palette, I was totally involved getting the five gradations towards white  even with one another. To do that, corrections  had to be made along the way. Different colors having different powers of saturation. There was no set formula to make charting easy, but starting with a smear of white and working from the whitest tint to the darkest color mix worked best.  In the process, one quickly learns cleanliness is next to Godliness. On the paint table, I kept mineral spirits and a half and half mix of Murphy's oil soap for thoroughly cleaning the brush between color changes.  The  palette needed constant cleaning too. No contamination is key to a reliable chart.

 

 

Also key is knowing where the five color values fall when compared to a five step gray scale. So I charted that too. It's a handy tool for determining the values of your subject and where to find the value match on the charts. It gives you a place to start and eliminates excessive mixing for having charted the color, you already know the proportions of what to what.  For this gray scale I used the faster drying Titanium White and Ivory Black.  The black you see though isn't the black of the tube.  A little white was added to bring it closer to a number 9 or 10 gray on a photographer's gray scale. You can't see it accurately in this reproduction, but Titanium definitely has a bluish tint--making charting Flake White with Ivory Black interesting IF I wasn't so anxious to get on with Cobalt Blue versus Ultramarine Blue. The two look very close to me who does love Cerulean Blue over Ultramarine and may want to make my own adjustment to Schmid's palette?

 

Over the weekend, chart number one finally dried enough to remove the tape.  Letting the white in  illuminated the colored squares that appeared darker, retracted, when  surrounded by black. Once again proving that joinery is everything.

 

 

While charting took up a lot of time this last week and weekend, it did not get in the way of my working on Rain and My Guys.  As a color came up that applied to these paintings in progress, I used it--and I knew how to mix it again when the batch was gone.   Love being curious, determined and wiser. Love not stumbling around looking for the right value while wasting paint.