Colour Wheel Query

[david pickford]

Hello guys, this is my first posting on this forum so apologies if i am asking stuff that has been hammered to death elsewhere.

Now i have been modelling incuding figure painting for 10 years plus, but only recently perhaps thinking about the finer points in an effort to raise the bar on my efforts.

My question isin relation to shading/highlighting base colours. I have always reached for the black and white to do this which is the no brainer approach and leads to a monochromatic look.

When i look at books on fine art, artists say leave black and white off the palette, darken shades with their complement on the colour wheel- so yellow is darkened with purple and so on. This leads to a very vibrant colour range that i dont see in modelling where black and white predominate. Are there painters out there who adopt the fine art purist approach? If so who are they so i can check their work?

Thanks

 

[polyphemus]

If it's any help this is one I painted a couple of years ago;

http://www.planetfigure.com/threads/the-king-in-yellow-by-mdc.38093/#post-390485

the yellow was shaded with violet/brown tones.

Geoff

 

[housecarl]

This red was shaded with olive green.
Carl.

 

[megroot]

I should buy it. It cost almost nothing. I use it every day when I'm painting.
If you can lay your hands on the book "Color Theory and Application"from Bob Knee (it is very hard to get) you got a great resource for staying out with black and white.

marc

 

[david pickford]

Geoff carl, interesting pics, i wouldnt have guessed what you had done if you hadnt told me. I guess its about the psychology of colour perception - its counterintuitive, but i am going to try and paint without
black and white having seen what you have done. I will let you know how i get on!

 

[John Bowery]

Dave,
Add equal amounts of black and white and you have grey. So fifty percent of grey is black and 50 percent of grey is white. So any time you add white or black you are adding 50 percent of grey. This tends to dull the colours.
Sometimes you have to add black or white but the more times you can stay away from it the better off you will be. This is also a hard concept to understand and it took me a long time to really grasp the context. I try to always paint with that concept in mind.
Cheers
John

 

[Alex]

i use diluted black to outline small things in the sculpt.
but i never use black to render shadows..
i just look at the color wheel and grasp the complement...
and i experiment a lot... that's the key i think.

 

[bonehead]

Mix complimentary colors together, and you will get brown - eventually. If that was your aim all along, then fine. Mixing white and black into any color to darken or lighten is also a sure guaranteed way to dull your colors down - sometimes. For instance, it is okay to lighten pale colors with white because there is nothing lighter than white. Similarly, darkening dark colors with black works pretty good too.

However, if you want to maintain the intensity of hue (color), then you are better off finding, not complimentary colors, but analogous colors which closely follow the tint of the original hue. An example would be lightening a medium blue with a sky-blue color; or highlighting red with a vermillion shade. Or, conversely you can darken a pale blue with medium blue or medium blue with a dark blue or red with a deep purple color. As a rule of thumb, it is better to lighten middle tones with corresponding lighter and darker tones of the same color. Although the use of complimentary colors is a standard of all art books and schools, for painting figures it is a sure-fire way to end up with dull muddy looking figures. If that is what you want, then go for it!

If that is not what you want, then consider what i have said above. Of course, none of this applies to oil paints since they do not generally come in numerous slightly varying shades of each individual color as do acrylics (Vallejos for instance) or model enamels. I hope this helps.

 

[Einion]

When i look at books on fine art, artists say leave black and white off the palette, darken shades with their complement on the colour wheel...

General warning about art books David: lots of advice in modern art books ignores advice or dismisses common practice from the past in favour of newer thinking, usually without any regard to whether it was bad advice or practice (in which case we should absolutely move past it).

And sadly one of the messages that tends to get spread most strongly is the complete avoidance of black, because it is one of the main culprits in the creation of 'mud', it "kills all colours", it doesn't exist in nature, it is the cause of all evil etc. Okay, I made that last one up but you get the picture.

As for avoiding white, except in the context of watercolour I can't think of many books that say not to use it. Best of luck to anyone highlighting things without any recourse to white! The secret, if you can call it that, is merely not by itself (lots of people who believe they don't use white to highlight things are actually using it, but it's already mixed with something). That can also be one solution to shadow mixing using black: don't use only black.

...so yellow is darkened with purple and so on.

Case in point of my caveat above, this is based on colour theory built around RYB colour wheels (hopelessly out of date by now) in which all colour relationships are skewed. The actual complement of yellow is not purple at all but a kind of violet-blue (the Blue of RGB).

This is the visual complement to be precise, mixing complements are another subject.

This leads to a very vibrant colour range that i dont see in modelling where black and white predominate.

There is a fairly predominant look to the colouring in the hobby these days, made easier by the quick spread of trends online. I presume you favour brighter colouring, less muted and realistic?

Einion

 

[Einion]

Add equal amounts of black and white and you have grey.

In theory yes, but it's very important to separate theory from practice when it comes to colour because of how different real-world results can be compared to what theory says.

In paint, simple mixtures of black and white paints will nearly invariably yield a blue of some kind.

So fifty percent of grey is black and 50 percent of grey is white. So any time you add white or black you are adding 50 percent of grey.

That's a neat theory, but it's really misleading I'm afraid!

It might surprise you to know for example that many colours get brighter (higher in chroma) with modest additions of white and a few, darker blues for example, can accept significant additions of white becoming more and more chromatic before the colour finally starts to dull down as you add more white.

Einion

 

[Einion]

Mix complimentary colors together, and you will get brown - eventually.

What you should get is grey, neutral grey ideally.

Einion