Colour Modulation etc etc

[Jon H]

**WARNING - LONG POTENTIALLY DULL POST!!!****

This topic started in Storn's 7th Sea thread, but I wanted to move it out to this one, so as not to hijack poor Storn's thread!

The premise is:
Look at Storn's excellent Tooth and Claw piece. Some of the shadows are pure colour - a very deep blue.

When modelling form in colour, you can use tone - very crudely speaking add dark colours to your basic colour to create a tonal variation to indicate shadow. (eg: a "darker" colour)

OR

you could use a naturally deeper colour, like a deep blue. Cold colours recede visually anyway, so this can work especially well. Then you don't muddy your colours with black, and the shadows can have a high saturation - almost glowing darkness...

OR
Like most painters, you can use a mixture of both techniques without even knowing it.

Eric aked if I was refering to chiaroscuro - which, partly I am. Chiaroscuro, as I understand it, is the manipulation of light and shade to create the illusion of form.

This refers more to the first modelling option I mentioned - using tonal values to model form. (- eg colours nearer black for shadow). A purely black and white image almost exclusively uses chiaroscuro to model form. (ok, so lines of form, and just the basic shapes contribute, but black shadows, and grey tones are likely to do a lot of the work).

Interestingly Eric mentions that colour freaks him out - I know what you mean! When you're painting- let's say some red trousers for example - how do we tell what kind of red they are? - the bits strongly lit will be a different colour to the bits in shadow, and sometimes there's different colour of light to render as well! So I guess our brains sort of look for an average value, or just the middle ground between colour extremes.

For questions about coloured light check out Angus Macbride's work - the man is brilliant at rendering the slightly yellow quality of strong sunlight - mostly with blue shadows. (as well as all the other brilliant aspects to his work)

Anyway, there isn't really any great point to this, other than to kick off a bit of discussion about colour use and painting. Maybe other people have wisdom to share? What do you find particularly hard to depict, or what does your head in about colour and so on?

Well done for reading this far!!!!!

[Steve T. Laws]

Well, Jon, your topic is a lage one that demands both wisdom and experience. Unfortunatetly, I have neither.

I posit that the causes and effects of color in a piece, are a knowledgeable artist's tools, or another artist's happy accident. Either way it's pleasing to my eye.

In any case, my knowledge of color theory is poor at best, . . . hey how's this for a color theory? What if the artist uses colors not seen in the human's visible spectrum? Wow, think of the plausabilities!

Me thinks, me babbling

[Storn]

I'm not sure if I can put what I do into words. But I know that I rarely use black in my color work. Occasionally if I really need a dark, dark, blast, but then I always work in a color to the mix anyway.

As for the pure/almost colbalt blue in the background...I tend to be TOO colorful. I'm trying to work more in the grays anyway...but I tend to slab down swatches of pure chroma.

But shadows side of things... I tend to mix the compliment of whatever the lit side is. Then in order to deepen the shadow, I often glaze (sometimes paint opaquely) a cool color like you said. often a blue, sometimes a bluegreen, blue gray. In "Rain", I ended up using quite a bit of purple.

Then on the lightest side of whatever surface I'm trying to work on, I mix in warmer colors...often yellow ochre or cad yelo med and pump it with a bit of white to make it lighter. If I want a really bright, bright.... a lemon yellow with white will blast!

But what I've been slowly getting better at is spotting highlights in the shadow areas by using cool light colors. A cobalt blue mixed with white and a touch of gray can get some nice, nice detail work done in the shadowed areas.

I dunno, i'm kinda babbling.

[Eric Lofgren]

I usually approach a painting first with burnt umber, ultramarine blue, thalo green and combinations of other muted colors and block in an underpainting. I try and spend as much time at this stage as it will be the frame work for all the bright colors to come. I found a pretty good tutorial at Matt Wilson's site that reflects this. I studued enough of Frazetta's paintings to see how he worked and finally arrived at this process, although I'm sure it's been around for a long time. If you're accurate and patient enough while in the block in stage, you can forgo alot of details that might otherwise distract from the main focus of the painting, one of the secrets of a Frazetta painting if you look hard enough. Anyway, that's my strategy, not that I am any wonder at painting, but I try. Actually, I just finished a color stint for FFG and may have more coming up.

Thanks for listening,
Eric