Acrylic Painting Tips & Articles
Acrylic Painting
By Stephanie Pui-Mun Law (stephlaw@shadowscapes.com)
Color!
I'm not going to go into color theory in here. See the "Color" section of FARP for details on color theory. Which is not to say that those are not important or relevant. They are, very much so, as is any other knowledge about sketching and drawing and seeing. I will discuss aspects of color as they relate to acrylics physically though.
"Too much color is less color"         (?!?!?)
If you have worked with color before, you should not be daunted when faced by the array of pigments available. Even so, it is not necessary to go on a color shopping spree in order to paint good pictures. In fact, with all the various hues and ready-mixed colors on the store shelves, it sometimes can take away from the quality of your painting to use only colors that you can find in tubes and not bother with mixing them. You may end up limiting the depth possible to achieve in your painting by using too many store-bought colors, ignoring all the dozens of shades and tints of purple that you can get simply by mixing red and blue instead of using a straight-from-the tube lavender.
For example, take a look at the painting above. How many different colors and tints can you count in there?
There are two tube colors in that painting: ultramarine blue and cadmium orange (Oh, alright, 4 colors, if you wish to count lamp black and titanium white as colors too). Anything else is a mixture of blue, orange, black, and white -- all those various shades of blue and orange, purples, flesh tones, browns, lavenders.... Limited tubes of colors does not mean limited color palatte!
Color TIP:
As an interesting excercise, try something like that example above. Pick a painting to copy, pick two complimentary colors (Complimentary colors are opposite colors: red/green, blue/orange, yellow/purple), and limit yourself to use only those two colors and some black and white. Then try to copy the painting or picture that you have chosen, reproducing the colors as accurately as you can with your limited colors. Don't be afraid to mix like crazy!
Underpaintings, Glazes, and Scumbles
What do glazes and scumbles have to do with color? Quite a bit, in fact.
Have you ever tried to copy a painting (especially old master painters) and found that when you tried reproducing the image's colors, even though your paints were mixed perfectly and looked exactly the same as the original's when you looked at it on your palatte...it just doesn't look the same?? (Ignoring painting skill levels for the moment). Does yours look flatter, less vibrant for some reason? Less depth to the color?
Or perhaps you never noticed any difference at all.
Take a look at these two swatches on either side.
The left circle is just a wheel with several colors on it.
The right circle is that same wheel, using the original layer of paint as an undercoat or underlayer to a layer of solid red paint. Notice how the red looks very different (even in a bad scan) when painted over each of the colors. Some of the underlayer shows through, affecting the vibrance of the red. Light bounces off of layered paint in ways that a scan can not begin to show you, but the result is that you end up with very differnt, deeper colors.
Now think in more subtle terms. Imagine layering color on color over a whole painting, and what the overall effect would be -- many different hues and subtle shades that are each affected by what colors went below. A flesh colored cheek could have an underpainting of soft rose and dark browns to give it a warm and soft blush, while an ice queen could have an underpainting of blues and greens with white glazes on top.
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