Learning to See

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Full Still Life Session Three – Colour Mixing

Session Three will be here on

Monday October 25th

at

6PM UK time (10AM Pacific, 1PM Eastern) Check your timezone here

What we’ll be doing

This week, we’ll be devoting a whole session to colour mixing.

I’m going to take you through each of the main colours we need to paint the objects in our subject.

We’ll be covering what the light and shadow colours are for each, why and how they differ, and how to mix them.

We won’t actually be doing any painting in this session, but in the next (fourth) session, we’re going to use these colours to paint a simplified colour study, very similar to the value study we painted in session two.

These colours will represent a simplified version of the subject, but, like the values, they will give us the anchors we need for each colour area to make sure that we don’t wander too far from what we need to give this subject life.

I recommend you have a go at mixing along with me. We’ll be going pretty slowly, and I’ll be explaining the approach to mixing each colour as we go, including which Munsell colours we’ll be aiming for, and different mixing strategies depending on whether you have the student Munsell book or the big one.

We will be going quite in depth on the practical use of Munsell to help mix colours for light and shadow in this session, so it’s an important one. That’s why I’m giving a whole session just to discussion of the colour choices and how to mix them.

For the next session, you’ll need to have these colours mixed and ready before we start, so do make sure you feel comfortable with mixing them after this session. They are the key to a successful painting at the end!

What you’ll need

Palette

palette knife

Tube paints:

  • Titanium white
  • Lead white
  • Ivory black
  • Raw Umber
  • Quinacridone Rose
  • Magenta
  • Ultramarine blue
  • Phthalo green
  • yellow ochre
  • bright yellow lake

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