Today's post is by Lori Woodward. Lori earned a bachelor's degree in Art Education from the University of Arizona. As a freelance writer for various art publications, she has written more than 60 published articles for American Artist, Watercolor, Workshop, and International Artist Magazines since 1996. Her paintings, along with instructional articles, have been featured in Watercolor Magazine since 2007, and in American Artist's Highlights Issue, Step by Step 2011, with the article: "Moving into Acrylics". Woodward has co-authored the book, "Watercolor Step by Step" a Walter Foster Publication, and authored a chapter for Calvin Goodman's "Art Marketing Handbook for the 21st Century". She has been a member of the Putney Painters since 2004, a small invitational group of painters who are mentored by Richard Schmid and Nancy Guzik.
All images are copyright the artist and are used here by permission of those artists.
Have you ever learned a new vocabulary word - at first, thinking you've never heard that word before - and then after learning its meaning, you hear it all the time? I studied art for decades before I realized that some advanced artists did not paint gray areas... gray.
That's the way it has been with me and subtle color temperature changes. I never noticed these tiny sparks of color in paintings until I learned the term, "confluent color" from artist/teacher Jack Beal. Yes, I previously understood that good color harmony means that colors are repeated throughout the composition, but now I have a higher understanding of how bits of color are repeated in all areas of the painting, but in the correct values.
Above: Details of two paintings by Daniel Keys - both these paintings use Confluent Color... where the white areas contain variety of color from pink to yellow to green to blue, but all with the correct value so that they still read as "white". I'll discuss color temperature and how the color of your light source creates harmony in a future blog post.
For those who are newbies to art... value is another word for the amount of lightness or darkness you see on an object. It's easier to see correct values when you squint at your subject, but values gets more complicated when taking them into consideration at the same time as color because there are many variables involved. For example, the tube color, cadmium red has a darker value than the color cadmium yellow because red is naturally a darker color than yellow. Likewise, ultramarine blue has a darker value than either red or yellow.
To make this concept even more complicated, where light hits an object, it changes the value and color of that object. A red apple looks much lighter where the light source hits the surface. The shadow under the apple is going to have a darker value than the lighted side of the apple. So even within one red object, we can have several values. Each of those values on that same apple will also have color temperature variations. But as I said earlier, I'll get into that at a later date.
Got that so far? This is getting pretty boring right? I know as an artist that descriptions without pictures don't communicate to me very well. I must see examples of what the writer is saying. So here we go.
Above is a painting and detail of that painting done by Kyle Stuckey when he was 17 years old (2004). At the time, I was his instructor, so while critiquing this painting, I advised him to make his lights and shadows using "identifiable" colors instead of just shades of gray (for his next painting). Shown Below is a painting he completed a few months later. Notice how each value has an identifiable color - not just white, gray or black.
Below are recent paintings of Stuckey's. Even though clothing may actually be white, an artist can enhance the painting by pushing the color he or she sees to a higher saturation point... meaning more colorful. It's OK if hair contains subtle greens and purples. In fact, as long as the value is correct, artists can get away with exaggerating most any color they like.
Color is a complicated subject... one that has taken me years to understand and implement. Below are a couple of watercolor paintings where I used confluent color. Notice how the lighter/whiter areas contain a variety of exaggerated color. Furthermore, each object of the painting contains colors from other objects in the painting - but using the correct value (lightness or darkness) so I can get away with exaggerating them.
Please don't hesitate to ask me questions. I, by no means, am saying this is the only way to paint. There are many valid approaches to art - some artists are tonalists, others are colorists; some are realists, and others are impressionists or abstract artists, and that's perfectly OK. I am here to present ideas to you - which you may take or leave as you like.