Grays Essentials for Painters
Grays do a couple of things. First, grays enhance the warm and cool variations in a scene that make sunsets, sunrises, bright days, and moonlit nights so spectacular. Second, grays are necessary for keeping colors clean. Grays are crucial in representational art because our world is full of lowly saturated colors. All too often we
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Color Combinations for Harmony in Paintings
Here are a few examples of basic color scheme’s that can be used in seascapes and landscapes. In order to be successful at using a color scheme, the colors must be mixed before painting begins. Of course, most paintings overall follow one scheme but can include small amounts of color outside that scheme. Monochromatic—A single
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Warm and Cool Colors in Paintings
Warm colors are those with red in them. Cool colors have blue in them. Pure yellow—yellow without any orange or green tint—will appear more to the cool or warm side depending on the surrounding colors, seriously, check out the images. The purpose of warm and cool is that it not only adds interest, but is
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Simple Value Rules for Painters
Foreground objects have more value variation than distant object. Foreground objects also are overall darker than distant objects. Shadows in the foreground are well defined in value. Distant objects may have differences in color between the shadow and lit planes, but almost always show less value contrast. Painters tend to paint lighter than they really
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Painting Value: Light and Dark
Value plays a huge role in the success of a painting. Value refers to the brightness of a color if it were seen in grayscale. Any color can have the same value as another color which is why it can be very hard to tell values apart. White is always the brightest value and Black
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The Paint Palette
A palette is not only that thing you’re mixing color on, it also means the color choices themselves. The choice of your primaries does limit your color options, but only when you stick to those primaries. That is why I suggest starting with only 3 primaries, and the 3 I’ll most often use are
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Color Wheel
The color wheel is a great tool for choosing color schemes and understanding how to mix the color you are interested in obtaining. The traditional color wheel is made of 3 primary colors—yellow, red, and blue—and any colors between those. This color wheel sometimes has value information with the lightest or darkest value
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