Learning about colour from Linda Kemp: Hue

Today I followed Ms Kemp as she introduced to me the concept of contrast by hue (or colour).  Basically by this she means following the colour wheel in analogous colours, creating contrast by the hue.  Analogous colours are those that are beside each other on the colour wheel and as such are related.  The nice thing about working with analogous colours is that you can't create mud, or neutrals by accident because all the colours are related.

To create a contrast painting by hue, it's important to remember that colours at the top of the colour wheel are lighter by nature (yellow) than those at the bottom of the colour wheel (red, blue, violet), but also the range of value does not go as far as with a value scale and will tend to stay in the mid-ranges.

Following along with Ms Kemp, I created 2 analogous paintings; one using warm colours (yellow, orange, orange-red,  and red), and one using cool colours (yellow, yellow-green, blue-green, and blue).

Unfortunately the camera washed out the yellow in my warm painting, but I think you still get the idea. Both paintings were done completely wet-in-wet, with LOTS of pure paint loaded on the brush.  The shapes don't really matter here, the idea was to learn the principle.  If you're thinking that the cool painting looks a bit more like a value painting - I have to agree with you.

Here I placed my value finder directly on top of the painting to see just how far the value range went.  From the scale, I think the yellow likely represents a value 9 (very light), and the blue looks to be around value 2 (very dark).  To me this was not a correct representation of a painting with hue contrast which should have a much smaller range of value contrast, so I decided to try again.

The only thing I really changed was the type of blue I used.  I went from cobalt blue (who knew it was that dark?), to phthalo blue which has some white in it.  Please forgive the rectangles in the background - I used a piece of watercolour paper that I had used before, just painted on the back.  I guess it shows through :P

Here are the two paintings right next to each other.  You can see that the one using the phthalo blue has got much less of a value contrast than the one on the bottom with the cobalt blue.

This was a very fun exercise and super quick to boot!  I can't wait to try this out in a painting!!