Colour Schemes
- Sketch and compose picture (tonal sketch)
- Decide on a colour scheme - test the colours on separate piece of your watercolour paper
- Progression of colours - work light to dark
- Leave plenty of whites
Create your own colour scheme from the three primary colours re/yellow/green. Here are three suggested colour schemes to use with Kessler Barn exercise but there are many more you could explore.
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The Limited Colour Palettes Artists Can Use to Excel at Painting
Ingrid Christensen
https://www.artsy.ne
Painters today have more pigments to choose from than any other artists in history. They can buy traditional, historical varieties that Rembrandt would recognize, such as siennas and ochres, or 20th-century innovations like phthalocyanines and quinacridones—pigments with an intensity that would have startled even the colour-loving Impressionists.
Despite this abundance, many artists and art educators endorse the use of a restricted “limited” palette as a way to develop coherent, harmonious, and personal paintings.
Monochromatic palettes
Limited palettes are great learning tools.
Students are often taught to paint in monochrome, using only a dark brown or black pigment, plus white. This allows them to focus on accurate shapes, degrees of light and dark—called “values” or “tones”—and paint application, without the additional complexity of colour. By mastering these austere palettes, students build a strong foundation for the later introduction of colour.
A more contemporary monochromatic approach involves using black and white, plus another colour. In this example, phthalocyanine blue is introduced to produce a work of tonal accuracy that transcends the academic flavour of a strict black-and-white exercise.
Ingrid Christensen
https://www.artsy.ne
Painters today have more pigments to choose from than any other artists in history. They can buy traditional, historical varieties that Rembrandt would recognize, such as siennas and ochres, or 20th-century innovations like phthalocyanines and quinacridones—pigments with an intensity that would have startled even the colour-loving Impressionists.
Despite this abundance, many artists and art educators endorse the use of a restricted “limited” palette as a way to develop coherent, harmonious, and personal paintings.
Monochromatic palettes
Limited palettes are great learning tools.
Students are often taught to paint in monochrome, using only a dark brown or black pigment, plus white. This allows them to focus on accurate shapes, degrees of light and dark—called “values” or “tones”—and paint application, without the additional complexity of colour. By mastering these austere palettes, students build a strong foundation for the later introduction of colour.
A more contemporary monochromatic approach involves using black and white, plus another colour. In this example, phthalocyanine blue is introduced to produce a work of tonal accuracy that transcends the academic flavour of a strict black-and-white exercise.
Palettes with one warm and one cool pigment
To add more versatility to their palettes, painters may choose to select one warm and one cool pigment, plus white. In this example, burnt sienna and ultramarine blue are mixed to create a full tonal range, as well as temperature variations from cool to warm. Colour temperature is a useful tool for creating the illusion of depth on the two-dimensional canvas.
Warm colours appear to come forward in a painting, while cool colours are recessive. This effect is visible at the inner and outer parts of the bowl. Both areas are greyed because they contain all three colours of the palette, and they are exactly the same value. Yet mixing a larger amount of burnt sienna into the front of the bowl results in a warm colour, while mixing more ultramarine into the inner bowl makes it cool.
Notice how the warmer mixture appears closer to the front of the picture plane, while the cooler colour recedes into the middle ground. This effect, added to the use of value changes, can create works that convey both form and space.
To add more versatility to their palettes, painters may choose to select one warm and one cool pigment, plus white. In this example, burnt sienna and ultramarine blue are mixed to create a full tonal range, as well as temperature variations from cool to warm. Colour temperature is a useful tool for creating the illusion of depth on the two-dimensional canvas.
Warm colours appear to come forward in a painting, while cool colours are recessive. This effect is visible at the inner and outer parts of the bowl. Both areas are greyed because they contain all three colours of the palette, and they are exactly the same value. Yet mixing a larger amount of burnt sienna into the front of the bowl results in a warm colour, while mixing more ultramarine into the inner bowl makes it cool.
Notice how the warmer mixture appears closer to the front of the picture plane, while the cooler colour recedes into the middle ground. This effect, added to the use of value changes, can create works that convey both form and space.