Chroma

Week 4 at the Florence Academy – Painting

/ Elizabeth B. Tucker / Leave a comment

Weeks 4-6 at FAA summer program focuses on painting. The painting portion of our curriculum the week started out fairly well.  Using umber paint, I transferred drawings and master copies onto linen panels and then proceeded to wipe out the light areas. 
 

I wish I could have stopped with just the wipe-out. First of all, I really like wipe-out paintings, but more importantly, it went rather downhill from then on. I didn’t even want to share this week because I felt the work was really rough, but I was encouraged to share by my sister and also by a good friend who is also a student to lay it out. And as a student myself, I like seeing how instructors make mistakes and what they do about them.

Being a student is quite a humbling experience. I’m constantly reminded of something my husband often says to me: “Be comfortable being uncomfortable.” And to keep this in perspective, no one is going to get hurt or need an ambulance ride if my paintings and drawings don’t work this week. 🙂


The lesson on both of these paintings was about turning form. Turning form is why we see dimensionally. It can be achieved using just value (lights and darks ) but color adds a more nuanced dimension with warmer and cooler colors as well as more or less saturated colors. A color (hue) can have the same value as one next to it, but if one of the colors is more chromatic, the less chromatic color will appear to recede. In addition, and at the same time, we have to take into account the planes of the forms. So form is visually described using hue, value, and chroma.


John Muir Laws

We have to note if the form is facing the light, turning away from the light or in the dark. These three planes are the simplest way to think about turning form, but edges, temperature, speed that the form is turning has to be taken into account. And between each plane is another plane so the form turns can get very, very subtle. Bouguereau was a master of subtle turning of form .


Breton Brother & Sister – William Bouguereau
Metropolitan Museum of Art

I felt I had a rather good drawing of Tory. This is a working drawing where I wanted a good likeness and to give myself the information of the major and some minor planes.

I tried transferring the drawing with charcoal and then going over it with a permanent pen, but the transfer didn’t work as well as I had hoped. We had the model so I thought I would be OK. Below is the image from day 3 or 4 of a 5 day morning pose. You can see the palette arrangement and the painting. I lost the drawing, which happens, but I wasn’t able to get it back in the time allotted. At the same time I was learning a new mixing technique and method that our instructor, Gregory Mortenson, uses when he paints. It’s a good method, but a lot to juggle in a short time.

My second painting of the week was a master copy of Elizabeth Nourse Head of a Girl. I love her painting and I liked my drawing of it so it felt reasonable to try painting it. The challenge, at least for me, was that the forms were turned in a more brushy, a la prima, way. I think Nourse may have painted this in one sitting.

Her strokes are more expressive and work with the forms. Mine got ‘mushy’.

I did a 3 hour a la prima painting at home where I wanted to make stronger notes of the colors she used. I also changed my palette colors from a basic 3 color red, blue, yellow ochre, sienna, to a secondary palette plus burnt umber to see if it would be possible to match her colors. I could, to a degree, but the jury is out as to whether or not it works even as a series of color notes. 

If you like paintings of still life and interiors I want to recommend an artist who is new to me but revered in his homeland of Westerendem, Netherlands. Henk Helmantel is sublime at capturing beautiful light. You can get a beautiful book of his work on Amazon. 

Sorry I can’t seem to upload any images, but click on the links to see his work.

I hope you find these Art Tips helpful and informative. Feel free to pass them on. In case you missed previous Tips, you can find them here on my blog

Until next week!

Lizz

How to Understand Color, Chroma, and Value

/ Elizabeth B. Tucker / Leave a comment

A student asked, “How can I understand color and value better? How do I interpret them?” Great question!

There are several ways we interpret color and value, but the most common way is expressed through the Munsell Color System. According to Munsell we define color 3 ways: Hue, Value, and Chroma. 

To review, Hue is the name of the color family. For example, pink can be part of the Red family or the Violet family, depending on its bias. Brown, such as Sienna and Umber, is more aligned with the Orange family. Value is simply how light or dark something is. And Chroma is the intensity of the color. In the examples above, a Cad Orange is very chromatic. It’s bright. Siennas and Umbers are dull, or less chromatic.

The tricky part comes when we are looking at something that is quite chromatic and then try to assign a relative value to it. Gamblin paint company has helped us out by grading their colors according to hue, value, chroma, temperature, and color family.  At the top of the chart you can click on each label in the pale blue bar to rearrange the order of each of the columns.

To train one’s eye you might want to use the Gamblin chart this way: Just underneath the “Color Temperature and Value List” click the “Value” in the grey bar.The colors will rearrange by that criteria. Then compare all the colors that share the same value. Once you understand intellectually which color is which value, you can then compare other colors to what you know, thereby building up your visual acuity. (FYI…….Each time you click the top of a column it will change the order, i.e. lightest value to darkest. Click again and it will reverse it to darkest value to lightest value.)

We can compare chroma the same way. Brighter and more brilliant colors will jump out at us. Duller colors will recede. Click on CHROMA at the top of the grey bar to see how chromatic the color is and then compare the value of the color with the chroma to other more or less bright/duller versions. This can be very helpful when painting landscapes, for example. Colors become less chromatic as they move back in space. 

Gamblin Radiant Colors laid against the colors they are made from

In the image above, all the Radiant colors from Radiant Yellow through Radiant Green are the same value. Radiant yellow is 2 values lighter (on a scale of 10), and Radiant White, which isn’t shown, is 3 values lighter. As for Chroma, Radiant Yellow is the most chromatic of these colors (14). Radiant Lemon, Red, Magenta, Blue, and Green are less so at 10. Radiant Violet and Turquoise are the least chromatic of this set with a chroma of 8. This is interesting, as to my eye Radiant Violet SEEMS more chromatic than Radiant Blue. For comparison, Cad Orange is one of the most chromatic colors – 16 on the Gamblin Chroma Scale.

Play with the colors on your palette and on your canvas. Lay down swaths of colors and compare how chromas are affected by what’s surrounding it. Put something bright in the middle of a swath of duller colors of the same value. Where does your eye go? Reverse it and surround the duller colors with brighter colors. Makes notes on what you are seeing. Keep a color notebook, and then come back to these notes after a few months to see if you’ve become more sensitive or if your initial responses still read the same. Try it with darker colors surrounding lighter value colors and visa-versa. What happens when you lay down bright colors of one value compared to duller colors of the same value. How do the colors play with each other? What happens when you lay down colors and surround them with colors of equal value and chroma? What did you eye do and where did it want to go? Compare this to the previous experiments. What are your take-aways??

The more you understand about color the more you will enjoy using it to help tell visual stories. To help you understand how color bias works with the Munsell system, and how to mix colors you might want to take my online color course, “Understanding Color and How to Mix It: Teaching Your Colors to Play Well With Others”

If you want more information on my teaching schedule or paintings that are available, please join my email list.