Painting Lesson - Color Chapter 1
Hi there, I’m Richard. I’ve decided to release Master in Colour course chapter by chapter as I complete each video. This is for two reasons, one is that it gives me the motivation to put down the brushes and pick up the mouse and actually complete the videos for you. The second reason is that it’s gonna give you the opportunity to just slow down a bit and really complete each chapter thoroughly, because there’s learning and exercises to do in each chapter. And thirdly, it’s also gonna give you the opportunity to ask me questions about it, and for those questions answered on the blog. So what follows me talking right now is the introductory chapter to the Master in Colour video series. So if you’re interested in joining me on the course, just pop your name and email address in the fields below and send it off and I’ll let you know when the next lesson is ready. Okay, happy painting. Hi there, welcome to my studio and welcome to the Master in Colour course. I’m Richard, I’ve been a professional painter since 2001, and an art tutor for nearly as long as that. I’ve been making these videos for the internet for couple of years, and they’ve been doing really well. Over 90,000 people have seen the videos so far and well, and I ask these people what was the main problem that they have with painting. What was the biggest thambenbua, and an amazing 72 percent said that color was the biggest problem. So if color is your biggest problem, then join the club, you’re in good company. So I thought, hey I know a bit about color, I’ll do a painting lesson on color. But it was only when I started trying to write down exactly what I knew about color that I realized just how little I did know, and how much I’ve been painting and doing my color work in instinct theory. So I started learning again. I’ve bought every color book that I can get my hands on, every DVD, I scoured the internet for months and months looking for the best online resources. And eventually I started teaching workshops where I used my guinea pig students to test out my new information and my new teaching techniques. And it was there that I really learned what was the best way to simplify this really complex subject, and help them learn it in, in a really practical way. We had some great little paintings coming out of those workshops, but what was really special to me was that moment when the light came on and in their heads and they began to understand what I was showing them. You see once you gain understanding and control over color, it completely turns you around from being a real worry to being an adventurer and a real joy. So some of the stuff we’ll gonna cover in this course is Color Theory, Seeing Color, Describing Color, Values, Mixing Color, Manipulating Color, Color Harmony, and Light Effects. So hopefully by the end of this course you’ll have save yourself years of struggle and have a real thorough understanding of color and how to use it with real confidence in your paintings. So let’s get started with the history of Colour Theory. I think it’s important to know where we’ve come from in terms of our understanding of color so that we can see clearly where we are at the moment and know what discoveries to led us to this point. I don’t wanna bore you with the physics of light and everything, so I’ll just give you brief overview and make sure that you know roughly how it all works. So we don’t go reliving something like what Plato first hyphotosized in his Emanation theory that and their fire gives rise to the visual rays shooting out from the eye interacting with the outer rays and there by allowing objects to be seen. Newton showed us in the 1700’s that white light from our sun contains all the colors of the spectrum. The once you can see on the rainbow plus a whole bunch of others that we can't see, like ultraviolet and infrared. He then notices the similarity between red and violet at either end of the spectrum and join them together making a circle, the color wheel as we know it. This was the birth of modern color theory. That knowledge didn’t become practically useful to artists until Michelle Schovrell, who managed the production of dyes for French tapestry manufacturer made a remarkable discovery that an intense dye color will produce the appearance of color on surrounding neutral areas. And that this new perceive color was almost directly opposite the original color on Newton’s color wheel. Let’s have a look at this visual phenomenon. Keep your eye on the middle of the orange square for the next 20 seconds. You’ll see when I removed the square that a blue after image is formed in your eye, and blue just happens to be the complimentary color of orange. Meaning it’s directly opposite orange on the color wheel. Again in France, the painter Eugene Delaqua, used these new discoveries to further his realistic lighting effects. He learned things like red cloth have greenish shadows and the shadows of yellow objects have a tinge of violet in them. And doing this, he was able to break away from the classical dark backgrounds and the dulled tonal treatments of shadows, and introduce color into shadows effectively making the whole painting more vibrant. He was later reported to say that “I can paint the skin of the goddess with mud, provided you let me surround it with your art colors”. This is actually possible to, if you surround a warm gray with the strong blue, it will actually resemble Caucasian flesh. The Impressionists were inspired by Delaqua’s discoveries. And aided by the invention of a wider range of more vibrant paints, sold and easily transport on a tube, they painted outdoors and search for a more meaningful expression of natural light and color. Instead they tended to paint in a mid or high key and add compliments to their lighter shadows. These artists included Monet, Renoir, and Pizarro. In London at the same time Joseph Turner was exploring bold colors and atmospheric effects which also had an effect on work with the impressionists. Meanwhile, Georges Seurat developed a very technical approach to color, a painstaking method called pointillism, which intended to mix colors visually on the canvas rather on the palette. To make a green for example, he would place a small stroke of blue beside one of yellow, so that from a distance the two colors combined and the eye to create a more vibrant green that what can be achieve by mixing the color on the palette. This is in fact how a modern four color printing press works, by placing tiny dots of pure color next to each other to create an image in the eye. The process is just too taxing for most artists though, so, pointillism as a movement didn’t last for very long. Post impressionist like Paul Gauguin and Van Gogh learn the technique of the impressionists but began to used color in a more emotional manner. They were less concern with the actual appearance of light and atmosphere than with emphasizing the beauty of pure color and line, in a fairly flat picture plane. Van Gogh felt that colors had symbolic meaning. To him yellow symbolized love and light. Red and green conveyed passion and conflict. Deep blue was the color of spiritual rest. And grey was associated with serenity. Paul Cezanne’s later works can be seen as one of the bridges between the art of 19th century and the 20th century. He color almost like a chisel to shape objects. Where he enjoyed the contrast of grade color with saturated color. He wrote “ when the color achieves richness, the form maintains its fullness also”. His works along with others, inspired the cubists, expressionists, and fobs. Who all used colors in an arbitrary fashion. No longer concerned with representing nature and their richness, but turning more to the inner world of the artist to draw inspiration from. So post modernism was born, and a gap of some hundred years ensue until today when we are seeing a resurgence in the academic popularity of representation art. Over that time though, there’s been artist who have kept the flame alive and passed it along to their own students, safeguarding the knowledge that was hard won over many years. Some include Russian painter Serge Bonggat, American Charles Hawthorne, and Henry Heinch. So through all these artists efforts and many more, we now have a good understanding of what we can achieve with color and painting. We’re standing on top of a mountain of discoveries and achievements and we’re now at able position of having the knowledge and technology to achieve with paint a range of depth and color expression that was simply not possible on the past. So next chapter I’m going to walk you through discovering your own power with color. So you too can climb up the mountain and see what the view is like from up there.