Learning about colour from Linda Kemp: Intensity

Painting to create contrast by colour intensity is a more challenging concept for a watercolorist, or at least it goes against everything I've ever learned about painting in watercolour!  The one thing every  watercolorist is terrified of is creating MUD!!  This can happen in so many different ways, but it's generally a result of using too many different colours in the painting.  Sticking to a few pure colours reduces the risk of mud and keeps the painting vibrant.

However, as Ms Kemp points out, a painting done with contrast by colour intensity can have a softness and elegance to it that a more colourful, value contrast painting won't have.  

Intensity contrast comes about when an artist takes advantage of complementary colour relationships.  These are the colours that are opposite each other on the colour wheel.  When these colours are mixed, they create a neutral colour (also known as mud, grey, dull, etc).

In this example, I followed Ms Kemp and painted pure orange, then mixed very small amounts of blue to gradually create a firm neutral colour (neither orange or blue).

With this in mind, I followed along and created this painting.  Again, the point is to have the contrast be a result of the intensity of the colour, not any dramatic changes in value.

I'm not sure I got the exact right shade for my neutral, but I think it still works.  The orange and green stand out very well without the neutral colour being too dark.

I found this to be the most challenging of the three concepts to work with, but I also think that I can better appreciate paintings that have been done this way.  I know I used to look at paintings that were done only in neutrals with some hints of pure colour here and there, and wonder why - what was the point.  But now I have a better understanding of what the artist was trying to do and why.  

The trick with this type of colour relationship I think, is to find an appropriate means of using it.  That's probably the trickiest part about it.

Well, this was the last colour relationship in Ms Kemp's workshop and I definitely learned a lot!  I found that she broke it down very nicely and easily conveyed each concept.  If you haven't read my previous posts on Value and Hue, just go to my blog page - they were all posted very close together.

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!!

Learning about Colour from Linda Kemp: Value

In my never-ending quest to improve my skills, I started following colour-theory lessons by Linda Kemp, a renowned and well established artist.  I know, I know, "Colour theory...ewww how boring!".  I can't agree more!  I also find the topic incredibly terrifying!  There seems to be no end to the rules and arrangements of how and when to use colour.  However, the title of Ms Kemp's video "Simplifying Color" does give me a sense of hope that I may be able to finally grasp this usually very dull topic :)

She's approached this subject very systematically, which I appreciate.  The video starts out by outlining the 3 properties of colour: Intensity, Value, and Hue.

You can see in this strip that Intensity contrast is when you contrast a pure colour with a neutral colour, thereby making the pure colour stand out.  Value contrast is when you paint from the lightest light to the darkest dark (here the orange is lighter than the black).  And Hue contrast is when you paint contrasting colours (i.e. orange and blue) to make either or both stand out.

In this post I will be focusing on my work following her Value contrast lesson. 

First, it was important that I understand the relationship between light and dark values.  Similar to a black/white value finder, I followed along to create a gradation of values using only water to change the colour.  I'm not sure I succeeded too well here, as I seem to have a lot of gradations that are very similar in the lighter values, but hey, I tried!

Next I was to learn the difference between "low key" and "high key" paintings.  Low key paintings use values ranging from mid to high (very light/white), while High key paintings use values ranging from mid to dark (black).  I think I did okay representing the high key values, but the low key values gave me some trouble.  I'm not sure if they were supposed to have more blue in them to increase their value levels or if I was supposed to keep the colours pure and specifically choose ones that would have a high value level.

Now onto the fun part :). 

To illustrate her point, Ms. Kemp chose to demonstrate how to paint a value contrast painting (following is my attempts to follow along).  The really fun aspect to this demonstration is that Ms. Kemp LOVES to work in the negative.  This generally means that instead of painting the shape directly (i.e. a circle), you paint everything else in the space EXCEPT the shape and voila, your shape appears!  You'll get a better idea of what I mean if you follow along :)

First I drew some flower shapes on a piece of watercolour paper.  Then, selecting a colour that could easily go from lightest light to darkest dark, I painted around each flower shape in the lightest value of the colour.

Next, when the paper was completely dry, I drew in some stems for each flower and mixed a slightly darker value of the colour.  Then I carefully painted around ALL the drawn shapes.

After the paint had dried completely, I drew in some leaves and a few more stems.  I mixed an even darker value of the colour and repeated my painting around the shapes.  At this stage, smaller "captured negative" spaces have been created that must be painted properly or it all falls apart.  You see the tiny dark green spaces between the flower stems in the upper-middle?  Those are captured negatives.

This was by far the coolest step for me.  I have always been told that in watercolour you MUST NOT ever use white or black, and I gotta say that this has been darned inconvenient at times!  But Linda has generously given permission to use these values to mix with colours to aid in creating the values necessary.  In this case, I mixed some black in with my green paint to create the darkest value.  I drew in a few more leaves and painted around everything accordingly.

It's really important when painting like this that I take a step back periodically to see all the shapes and how they join, and where their spaces are.  I came very close a few times to completely messing up the exercise by painting the wrong thing!

While I can't say the painting itself is incredible, you definitely get the idea of what a value contrast painting should look like.  Now, there's nothing saying that you have to do this process in the order presented here.  Depending on your preferred methods, you could probably mask out the white flowers, leaves and stems and start dark, lifting mask and painting lighter as you progress.  This would be an example of painting in the positive.

I plan to continue the video and present my efforts in my next post.  Wish me luck!