Another day at the supermarket.
There's got to be something to paint in this parking lot.
OK, I'll see you in 45 minutes.
Well, it's 27 degrees outside, a little cold for painting in water media
but as long as I'm inside the car here, I should be able to just work through the windshield.
And I've got my stuff set up here in my lap. A watercolor sketchbook,
and it's primed with grayish watercolor, just to knock down the white.
They say that ice is just made of just oxygen and hydrogen, two elements.
So to paint it...WHOA!...I'm going to use two colors,
just blue and burnt sienna. Let's see what happens.
So I've got the white gouache, ultramarine blue,
burnt sienna, and I might use that alizarin crimson later for the car that's parked.
This is a small palette area, only about 2 and a half inches by 4 and a half inches.
So there's not much room to move here.
Now I'll start out with a cool shadow color.
I'm not using white yet because I want the variations in the tone.
I want it to settle in unevenly into that shadow color.
It's fairly dark, it's a little bit cool.
But I want it to be kind of grainy, because that's the way that snow looks.
And if I introduce just a touch of white,
it becomes a slightly cooler color of blue without that graininess.
So that's what you can do with gouache is control the texture or the graininess by using a little bit of white.
Now I also have this building in the distance.
It's a rectangular shape behind the snow pile there.
I'm using the brush in a "stipply" way.
Hitting the surface with the tip of the flat brush to get that texture of that concrete.
Now I want that flat tone, so I'm bringing in the gouache again for the sky.
It's kind of a milky textured paint.
There's a car parked next to the snow pile.
I need to draw in the car
and I'm going to do it with these blue lines in the chrome
that's reflecting the blue sky behind us.
Next I want to have a quarter-inch long flat to paint in the shapes of the darks of that car.
This way of painting I sometimes call painting with spots and dots
because really what you're doing.
is you're placing small or large shapes or dots in position.
Not worrying so much about line, like you would if you were drawing with a pencil,
but more an impressionistic approach
that places light and dark shapes next to each other.
The nice thing about a long flat quarter inch brush like this
is you can paint all sorts of shapes
like that radiator grill shape or the mirror shape
or the shapes that are behind the car.
So I'm some dots and spots and dashes and flashes back there.
building it up out of rectangles like almost out of Legos.
Now that car is anchored to the ground
and the snow in front of it by a fairly deep cast shadow.
I'll mix that with ultramarine and burnt sienna.
And lose that whole edge of the bottom of the car.
More spots in the background
As I look at the snow pile, the shadow side is cool, but there's a warm edge
where the light is scattering under the surface of the ice
and coming out on the shadow side
so I want to keep that effect of that warm glowing light
by keeping some of that underpainting color showing through
If I spend too long looking at the shadow side I can forget
that the lightest value in the shadow
is nowhere near as bright as those illuminated areas in the sunlight.
So let's wet that whole shadow side with water.
and while it's wet I can drop in a few little dark accents.
for some of the hollows of the snow
just to accentuate that textural character
without going too light and dark in that shadow
if I just touch it with the edge of the brush, the corner of the brush
those little blobs of color should spread out a little bit.
Now you might wonder: Why just use two colors
when you have a whole palette full of colors that you could use
and make it more rich and vibrant in color.
Well, there's an argument to be made for speed, efficiency, and economy.
I've only got a small amount of space, a small amount of time,
and I don't want to waste a whole lot of colors.
But more than that I want to explore the range of possibilities of each of these pigments.
You really learn about each pigment when you just do one against another like this.
And it's kind of like composing for piano and violin.
You explore what those two instruments can do together.
The only other color I've added is alizarin crimson.
I brought that back in because I used a touch of that on the car,
to get that reddish color.
These strokes are a little too light.
They'll dry darker. Gouache sometimes shifts when it dries.
There's a lot you can do with just color temperature.
meaning
how orangey it is, or how bluish it is.
For those of you not too familiar with color,
sometimes this relationship is called "complementary"
If you mix the two colors together and get gray,
then the colors are seen as complementary.
Not only blue and brown, or reddish brown,
but also violet and yellow.
or red and green can be used in complementary relationships
When mixing a color, my first thought is about the value: is it light or is it dark?
And then my second thought is usually: Is it cool or is it warm?
This limited palette keeps me in
that dialog of just warm versus cool and value.
without really even thinking too much about hue.
That would probably be the third thing I'd think about after thinking about value....and....
color temperature. I'd think about the hue—
where it is on the color wheel—yellow, red, green, or whatever.
And then the final thing you think about when mixing colors is saturation
Whenever you paint toward the light,
You're dealing with less overall chroma or saturation or brightness of the colors.
The colors are grayer
than they would be if you were painting away from the light.
In fact if I switch the camera around in the opposite direction,
you can see how colorful all the cars and trees and the sky are.
But in this direction, everything organizes mainly according to value
with lighter things farther back
and anything that's in shadow is a fairly deep shadow.
So ultramarine blue and burnt sienna
are completely adequate for painting a subject like this
since I don't need to get into brighter colors
If I did need to, if I was painting away from the light,
then I could use more full chroma colors.
All these branches lend themselves pretty well
to painting with a drybrush effect.
because I just want the texture of the branches.
I can't paint every single individual branch.
So by splaying out the tip of the brush,
and then spreading it out with somewhat dry paint on the fibers
I can get that texture that sort of simulates the look
of the branches against the sky.
This is part of the fun of painting, for me is...
...trying to look at nature in all its complexity and variety
and trying to think how I can translate
what I'm seeing into something the brush can actually accomplish
whether it's dry or wet,
or just a whisper of pigment on the brush,
or loaded with juicy pigment.
The character of the branches and leaves here is 'blobbier'
...evergreen foliage....so I have a wetter brush,
and I'm moving it kind of randomly
I try to let my hand and fingers have their own mind.
I was reading that an octopus has a brain at the base of each tentacle.
and every tentacle has its own personality.
And that's kind of what your fingers have to have
They have to have a mind of their own.
You can see there's a cast shadow
of the whole snow pile on that dark asphalt
and that explains that dark edge in the lower left.
Now I want to mix a warm color,
fairly high in value.
to lighten the darks
on the curb adjacent to that wet driveway
that leads back to the train tracks on the right.
Well, Jeanette's doing shopping for the holiday feast, so...
...naturally she's taking a little longer than 45 minutes
and that gives me enough time to finish up
some final details
It's fun contemplating this complicated scene.
Doing a speed painting from a parked car.
I can always use the colored pencils at the end
hit 'em with a little water to soften them up and they'll blend into the painting.
(music)
(sound of shopping cart)
Hey, there you are! I guess time's up.
I need an unloader, please!
Wouldn't it be cool if there was a full length instructional video
that took this material on complementary colors and ran with it?
(More about "Color in Practice")