5 of 10

Write now Article Tools

While learning to mix color from the master oil painter Hongnian Zhang, at the Woodstock school of art, I realized that color variation is infinite. Every color has a feeling, a personality. Every component of your painting must back up the primary motive behind the work itself, so always keep in mind the overall feeling you want to impart to the viewer with your use of color. Why is having color important to this piece in the first place? Why not just use a range of grays?

Remember, color is relative. I might mix 25 to 100 different little squares of yellow-orange before I find the one that I want. By beginning with your strongest color notes, you can see how the other colors relate to it. So your second color mark, whatever the hue, will only have its own presence relative to the first note. Anything can be painted a million different ways that's what modern art is all about. Forget what you may think of as color theory- beginning from anything else but the infinite is a way to lock your mind in parameters: primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, as well as all of the theories of combining them, while guidelines in understanding the basic fundamentals of mixing will only lead to sublime beauty by accident. You must learn to feel color and, strangely enough, just like you can only really learn to paint by painting, you have to feel color to know how to feel color.
The way to coax beautiful color and vibrating air from the tip of your brush is to see and feel the color in your mind. One exercise I had my children's art group try - to huge smiles was to make ten to twelve distinct tints or shades of an individual color. Then I had them write words next to the color to describe them. With crayons, pastels, and colored pencils, as well as other mediums with so many variations at the artists' disposal, it's easy to make the colors distinctive, vs. using for instance, a limited palette (primaries, white and black) and mixing each color for oil painting. One boy used words to describe his 10 various greens as "fuzzy, cloudy, minty, and sad." A ten year-old girl laughed at her row of blues when she wrote, "Grandma," because the color reminded her of her grandmother's favorite sweater."
So how do you mix infinite color? Practice of course. Follow the exercise below that I have all of my serious students complete to begin to understand the incredible subtleties available to you. Think of yourself as a colorist or a designer and search for unique color choices that have

• 1
• 2
• next page >>

Add your voice

Know something about How to mix a color?
We want to hear your view. Write now!