In this Part 2 of "All About Color" I will be referring to figure painting quite a bit because that's my primary focus. These practices can be used in any type of painting and drawing--even with colored pencils, and especially with other types of paint (acrylic, watercolor and gouache).
Tips For Your Palette and Swatches
A very helpful practice when setting up your palette is to start with white on the left and work clockwise from there into your warm hues. Then continuing clockwise, work into your cool hues eventually ending with your darkest on the right. Only load paints onto your palette that you will be using for your painting so you don't waste any, and it gives you more room to mix. When you make swatches label them with the colors you used so it'll be easier to recreate that hue later on. Also, when creating your swatches for a painting try to change it up a little bit here and there. For example, if you always use sap green to add to a flesh tone when creating a shadow, instead try veridian green. It's a little cooler than sap green, so it'll most likely add a little more depth.
Creating An Underpainting
An underpainting, also called a grisaille (pronounced griz-eye), is a technique that focuses on the values of your subject more than on the color. That part comes later in the form of glazing and scumbling. I'm not going to get into glazing and scumbling in this post though, but I do want to discuss the underpainting a bit.
For the underpainting it is traditional to use burnt sienna and burnt umber, or black and white. As the artist you would start by creating a full range of values using the hues you've chosen (I used burnt sienna and burnt umber for this one). Once your drawing is complete and you're ready to paint you will focus solely on the values of your subject. Begin with the darkest value and block in all the shadows. Personally, once this is done I move straight to the lightest value and begin blocking it in. Most people say to move a couple steps at a time from dark to light, but I find that by doing both extremes first you will get a ton of value transition just by mixing a mid-value in between the light and dark. Of course, for the lights you add white, but for the darks and really darks you use the burnt umber. If you need to achieve a very deep dark try adding a little bit of french ultramarine to your burnt umber.
To read the rest of this page jump over to Color Theory Part 2.
