Watercolor Painting for Dummies (28 page)
Read Watercolor Painting for Dummies Online
Authors: Colette Pitcher
Tags: #Art, #Techniques, #Watercolor Painting, #General
Temperature
is the feeling of warmth and coolness in colors.
Warm:
The colors of fire are warm colors: reds, yellows, and oranges. Warm colors give the illusion of forward movement in a painting. A red sports car will get a speeding ticket before the blue one because it appears to be going faster because of its warm color. Warm colors advance.
Cool:
The colors of water are cool colors: blues, greens, and violets. Backgrounds like sky are the hue blue. Cool colors help create the illusion of distance in backgrounds, forests, and bodies of water. Cool colors recede.
On the color wheel, warm colors occupy one half, while cool colors are on the opposite side. Now that you can find them, here is a way to use them. Warm colors seem to come forward. Cool colors seem to move away. You can use these temperatures to “push” and “pull” space. Create the illusion of depth in your painting by using warms in the foreground to make them seem to come toward the viewer and use cools in the background to make the scene look like it has distance.
You may hear warm and cool used to describe the same color. You can have a warm red — a red that has yellow in it — and a cool red — a red with blue in it. Although red is a warm color, it can be labeled cool if it has blue in it. It’s similar to color bias (see the “Avoiding mud: The bias color wheel” section earlier in this chapter). Red biased blue is cool. Red biased yellow is warm. Artists use this information to push and pull space within the same color area.
Intensity
describes how vivid or dull a color is. Other terms for intensity are
saturation
and
chroma.
A color is at its most intense straight out of the tube or pan. Anything you do to that color — adding water or mixing in another color — lessens the intensity. You can choose to have a bright, intense color by using the pure pigment, or you can make your colors a bit more natural by muting them with water or other colors.
Few items that you paint are as pure in intensity as paint straight from the tube. Usually, you need to mix a color with water or another color to make it look more natural.
Some exceptions, like flowers and sunsets, are very intense or bright, so you can use pure pigments as bright as you want. In the painting of roses in Figure 5-5, I used the most intense colors I could find straight out of the tube to simulate the beauty and chroma Mother Nature uses in flowers.
Figure 5-5:
Intensely colored flowers.
By adding water or another color, you also change value. Value is light to dark (see the “Value: What’s it worth to ya?” section earlier in the chapter). Intensity is brightness. Changes in one part of color affect other parts of color. Adjust with water or other colors until you get the color you want to match.
Color has implied meanings and can evoke certain feelings. You can say volumes without any words just by the colors you choose in your painting. To see what specific colors mean, take a look at Table 5-1.
In This Chapter
Keeping your balance when juggling painting elements
Introducing subtle changes
Pursuing repetition
Being more dominant, but in a nice way
Creating unity in your paintings
R
emember in school learning to spell
principle
and
principal?
The name for the “pal” who ran your school is spelled with
-pal
on the end. The other “principle” means “rule,” and both of these words end with
-le.
Although most artists may not like rules, they are important as guidelines to begin your art hobby or career and can be broken when you feel confident. With these rules of art, you can make design principles your “pals” too.
Chapters 1 and 5 talk about the elements of design, or the “nouns.” The principles of design are the “verbs.” In this chapter, you take the elements and use them in art actions like the verbs take nouns and give them action in sentences. Each principle can be applied to each element of design. In this chapter, you get to know how you can mix and match elements with principles.
The possibilities are endless using the few short rules of design. You can have more than one element and principle working in your art. In fact, you may have too many. To figure out if the art is working or can be improved, look at it and discuss it with others. The elements and principles are the language artists use to discuss and critique art. You can come up with unlimited design and painting solutions by using the principles I talk about in this chapter.
Every rule can be broken. That’s why art is so fun. Play around, and make up your own rules.
