Creating Fabulous Colours With Oils

This article follows the Rainbow Colours of the Impressionists, covering the various wonderful oil colours found on the palettes of the Impressionists. Have a look-see and find out what those colours are and how they were used by the masters, it just might inspire you when creating your fabulous colours using oil.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

The Colour Wheel

The Four Characteristics of Colour

Creating a Colour Wheel

Colour Harmony : Practical Tips On Using Colour For Impact

The Colour Wheel

Colour and its relation to light is very similar to that of music to sound. Where colour has its hues, tints, and shades, music has its many notes that create the different chords. And so it was in Sir Isaac Newton’s estimation, in his colour wheel, he had a musical note that lined up with each hue. By conducting several experiments in order to better understand the relationship between colours, he succeeded when he made a hole in the shutter of a dark room and waited until a ray of sunlight shone through, he then stuck a prism into the hole, what he saw was that when the white light that reflected off the prisms, it shattered into a spectrum of colours on the white wall – into the rainbow that we know now. In Newton’s own words, “A coloured image of the sun.” His was one of the earliest colour wheel illustrations that is quite similar to what we are most familiar with these days.

*Sir Isaac Newton’s asymmetrical colour wheel with the corresponding musical intervals from Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light.*

Since the mystery of colour has long been in the minds of scientists, philosophers, artists, poets, people from all walks of life really – many others would soon follow with their own theories on colour, colour mixing, and their own colour wheels. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe for example did not agree with Newton’s theory that darkness was the absence of light, for him darkness was an essential element in color production, though his findings on his investigation into colour was similar to that of Newton’s. Perhaps because of his background in literature and the arts, Goethe went into great detail about the psychological effects of colour and how it may affect our emotions and behavioral traits.

*Wolfgang von Goethe’s colour wheel from Theory of Colours.*

For the purposes of our oil colour mixing, Swiss painter and teacher Johannes Itten’s colour theory and colour wheel is a great reference. In his wheel, 12 colours are present and have been placed in their respective areas to simplify the instruction of the primary, secondary, and tertiary colours. And he also discussed what he considers to be the four characteristics of colour: its hue, intensity, value, and temperature. Just like Goethe, he studied how the different colours affect the viewer, and how each one’s perception of colour may differ.

*Johannes Itten’s “Colour Sphere,” a colour wheel guide that is still widely used by artists today.*

Primary Colours

Primary Colours cannot be created by mixing other colours. The three primary colours are, red, yellow, and blue and are the source of the secondary and tertiary colours. They are equally distanced from each other on the colour wheel, separated by three colour spaces between them.

Secondary Colours

Secondary Colours are the colours created by mixing two primary colours together. The three secondary colours are green, orange, and violet. They are similarly equidistant on the color wheel.

Tertiary Colours

Tertiary Colours are made by mixing a primary and a secondary colour together. The six tertiary colours are: yellow-green, yellow-orange, red-orange, red-violet, blue-violet, and blue green.

*I mixed a variety of yellows and blues from our* ***ZenART Infinity Series Oil Palettes*** to create a foliage of greens using oil colour. As you can see, it is very important to explore the different colours you can achieve by mixing certain colours together when delving into the world of colour mixing.

The Four Characteristics of Colour

Hue is the spectral colour or a source colour, it is one of the 12 base colours that you can see in the colour wheel above.

Value is the lightness or darkness of a colour that can be obtained by adding pure black, pure white, or gray to it. A colour is made darker by adding black, and is referred to as a “shade.” It is made lighter by adding white, referred to as a “tint.” And gray can be used to darken or lighten it, and is referred to as “tone.”

*Value scale of a single colour (blue), going from dark blue to the lightest tint of blue through the careful addition of white, each succeeding box containing more than the last.*

Intensity is the brightness or dullness of a colour, also referred to as saturation and chroma. The purer your hue is, the more intense it will be. The intensity can be reduced by adding other colours to the pure colour.

There are several ways that a colour’s intensity can be neutralized or decreased, and that is by mixing them with other colours such as earth tones, or as shown above – mixing with the primary hues with white, gray, and black.

A chroma scale example, where two complementary colours are found on opposite ends of the scale, to eventually merge at the middle. The hues start out as bright, intense colours that gradually grow duller as they reach the center – which is the optimum neutral colour.

*Here, I placed warm and cool oil colours on opposite ends of each strip and blended them slowly towards the middle to reach a neutral “greyed” colour using our* ***ZenART Infinity Series Oil Palettes*** *for colour mixing*.

Temperature is the warmth or coolness of a colour. It’s important to know that green, blue, and violet have chromatic properties that make them appear cool. They can be effective in creating a quiet and calm mood that recedes into the background. While warm colours like red, orange and yellow tend to advance to the foreground. This is because warm colours have longer wavelengths than cool colours, so your eyes see them quicker than the cooler ones. If you choose a subject that is predominantly cool, then it’s good to use warm colours to serve as a contrast and a way to balance the composition, thus creating a visual effect that will grab the viewer’s attention instead of confusion as to where and what to focus on.

This is an oil on canvas painting of mine where I used warm colours for the flowers and cool colours for the leaves and the background. By creating a balance in the colour temperature, it allows the viewer’s eye to focus where it should and not be overwhelmed. It is a great tool to use for creating emphasis in your composition. Oil colours used are from our ***ZenART Infinity Series Oil Palettes.***

The use of colours is one of the fundamental elements of art-making. Just like with any skill you wish to hone, a thorough understanding of how you can use it effectively and to your advantage is a must. Too often, many of us dismiss the thought of using colour wheels for colour mixing and miss out on the many great advantages it can give us. Maybe you might find them too theoretical and boring, but once you give it a chance, you’ll see that they are very useful tools to use when planning out your painting’s palette. You’ll be surprised at how much easier the process becomes with the aid of the colour wheel!

Of course, it seems easier to just buy the exact colour selections that you want to use, rather than learning how to mix different colours yourself. However, knowing how to create your own hues is an important skill that every artist should strive to learn. Many of the celebrated masters worked with limited colour palettes and yet were able to create a seemingly infinite number of colours from those. Another danger of using premixed ones is that unless you check each tube for the specific pigments used, you might unintentionally end up with mixtures that would clash with the other colours in your painting or they’d just turn out muddy. Great freedom awaits you when you can skillfully mix all the colours that your painting needs instead of merely relying on premixed colours.

Now, it’s time for you to create your very own colour wheel by applying and mixing the oil colours yourself. There’s no better way to start learning the wonders of colour mixing! Remember, there are many versions and variations of each primary colour. Some are darker, while others are lighter. Feel free to choose the version you like best, just keep in mind that your basic mixes will vary depending on the foundation colours that you choose.

Creating a Colour Wheel

This is an excellent way to understand the 12 basic colours and have a better grasp of the process on how they are created. Make your own colour wheel by following the steps below:

Step 1: Draw a large circle on a piece of illustration board or foam core. Try to make it as perfect as possible so you won’t have a hard time dividing it later on.

Step 2: Divide the circle into 12 equal segments. The more equal you make them, the better your colour wheel will look after.

*Here is a downloadable* **colour wheel pdf** *for you to practice your colour mixing on. Keep in mind that this might not be suitable for oil colour use when printed on regular paper.*

Step 3: First, paint the three primary colours inside the pies that are positioned at equal intervals from each – one-third placements around the wheel. There should be three blank pie shapes between each colour. These are Cadmium Red, Cadmium Yellow, and Ultramarine Blue.

Step 4: Now, mix the three secondary colours – green, orange, and violet. Once they’re ready, use those colours to paint the pies that are halfway between their respective primaries. You will now see a blank pie on each side of every colour.

Step 5: Fill in the remaining pies with the tertiary colours that are the mixtures of the primary and secondary on either side of it. Those are blue-violet, blue-green, yellow-green, yellow-orange, red-orange, and red-violet.

Step 6: Now, you have your very own colour wheel! Enjoy using it to create your colour palettes!

Colour Harmony : Practical Tips On Using Colour For Impact

Before embarking on your new painting journey, you should first decide on what colour palette to use. This will save you a lot of time and keep you from wasting your oil paint needlessly. If you are just starting out, then try using just two to four colours, they are enough to work with and to explore colour mixing. Gradually increase the number of colours as you go along and as needed, you will slowly but surely master the art of colour selection and mixing before you know it.

Complementary

These are two colours that are on opposite sides of each other on the colour wheel. Pick a colour and see which one sits directly across from it, those two are complementary colours. Colour combinations using this technique will be quite intense, the striking contrast can be dynamic, bold, and even bring an element of excitement to your composition. These colours create great chromatic tension when placed next to each other.

In Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” the orange colour of the sunflowers was contrasted against a blue background. The effect is quite strong and the sunflowers seem to just pop out from the painting.

Harmonious or Analogous

They are hues which sit next to each other on the colour wheel. These colours produce a calming effect, easily blend in harmony when used together in one composition, and are often found in nature. When using this technique, one colour serves as the more dominant of the three, while the other two support and accentuate it. So, it is crucial to create contrast so your painting doesn’t come out as too flat, one way to do this is by exploring the varying values and intensities you can use.

A fine example of this are the yellow, orange, and browns hues that are often found during the autumn season. The yellow-green harmonies associated with the zesty landscapes of spring make for a great analogous colour scheme as well. The next time you’re out or if you’re lucky to have such views from the comforts of home, take a look around or outside and see the countless harmonious colours that abound in nature that are just ripe for your colour mixing picking.

*As shown here, colours that sit next to each other on the colour wheel are considered to be analogous or harmonious colours.*

Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge” is a fine example of an analogous or harmonious colour scheme. He used mostly greens and blues for this painting and created contrast by adjusting the value and intensity levels of his colours.

Triadic

They are three (tri) colours that are equally distant from each other that you will find on each tip when you draw a triangle over the colour wheel. There will be three colour spaces between each of the triadic colour combinations that separates them. It can be challenging to use this colour harmony as the colours are quite strong and can be jarring if you’re not careful, just make sure to choose one as a dominant colour and use the other two as supporting ones.

Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl with a Red Hat” uses the triadic combination of red for the girl’s hat, a deeper blue for the clothing, and a subdued yellow for the majority of the background. By deepening the shades of the other two colours, red was allowed to dominate just perfectly. Colour mixing here was limited to the tonal values of the three colours predominantly used.

Split Complementary

This is a colour harmony that creates a colour contrast but less intense or visually jolting. It is similar to the theory behind complementary colours, but in this case you have a base colour and instead of using the colour that is directly opposite the base colour, you use the two colours found on either side of it – splitting it. So if your base colour is yellow, the other two colours are red-violet and blue-violet (the two colours on either side of violet).

Henri Matisse’s “La Danse” used red-orange as the base colour, with a deep green and deep blue as the two other colours. The bright red-orange of the dancing figures is balanced out by the subdued cool colours of the background.

Tetradic

They are colours that are rectangularly spaced apart on the colour wheel, and are four (tetra) colours in total that are made up of two sets of complementary colours. This can be a challenging colour scheme to manage as it can get sloppy easily, but as long as you remember to use one colour as the dominant one when colour mixing and experiment around with the balance of warm and cool colours, then this combination gives you more room to work with.

Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” uses the Tetradic colour combination quite skillfully. He used the colours blue, green, orange, and red to create a setting that is filled with colour but not visually jolting.

Square

This colour scheme also uses four colours, but unlike Tetradic, they are evenly spaced from each other with two colour spaces between each other. Similarly, it’s best if you choose one as your dominant colour, and carefully balance it together with the rest by paying close attention to the relationship between the warm and cool colours.

Achromatic

When defined, it literally means “without colour.” You solely use black, white, and shades of gray. They are considered to be lacking in hue and therefore neutral. For example, charcoal and graphite drawings are viewed as achromatic.

Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” is a masterpiece in itself and in the use of an Achromatic colour harmony. It is a purely black, white, and gray painting depicting the horrors of war and is one of his most well-known works.

Monochromatic

A monochromatic colour harmony uses one hue only and relies on the different tints, tones, and shades of that hue. This is a great way to practice creating effective designs through the exploration of the tonal values of each colour.

*Claude Monet’s “Morning on the Seine, near Giverny” mainly used the colour blue-green to capture the cool and misty atmosphere of the scene.*

Having gone through the different colour schemes you can use, it’s best to make studies and experiment before you decide on which one is best for your painting. You must keep in mind the harmony of your composition when applying these different colour mixing techniques. Many inexperienced artists will work on a small area of a painting, and move to the next area once it is finished. This jumping from one area to the next without visualizing everything as a whole creates discordance and confusion in the painting, as we have the tendency to forget the colours and style we applied in a specific area when suddenly switching to another, then another, and before you know it, things have been lost along the way.

My Tip: It is better to work on the whole painting at once. Move your eyes around the subject and the different elements, evaluate the relationships of the various colours and tones, and continue to make the necessary adjustments or changes as you go. This way, the painting will develop and evolve harmoniously at every and any stage of the process.

Have fun creating your own colour mixtures! Remember: Experimentation is key. Don’t be afraid to add pigments and discover new oil colours on your own. Record your formulas, and keep them in a handy colour journal you can refer to for future reference.

Along your creative journey, there will be people who will try to persuade you to use certain colour harmonies over the others. That’s okay, but you should listen to your soul and do what gives you pleasure and satisfaction. The colour harmonious listed here are there to give you guidance and help you master your colour mixing, but they are not set in stone. Start by learning them to help build your technique and confidence, before long you’ll be creating your very own colour combinations.

Which colours were a challenge for you to mix? What colour harmony/harmonies are you most comfortable using? What colour harmony/harmonies are you planning to explore for your future paintings? What future content would you like to see from us? Let us know what you think, we’d love to hear back from you. Feel free to leave a comment, and we’ll be happy to answer any queries you have.

To help you in your creation of fabulous colours, watch out for our next piece – Colour Mixing Tips For Oils. Until then, have a great time mixing and painting!

— MEET THE AUTHOR—

Ardak Kassenova, ZenART Supplies co-founder, @ardak_zenart

Ardak Kassenova is a London based contemporary artist, co-founder and creative director of ZenART Supplies. Her visual style—contemporary impressionism—share similar aesthetic qualities with those by the French Impressionists. After 20 years of a successful corporate career, becoming a mother to two wonderful girls, and with the continuous development of her practice by taking private lessons from the best artists she could find; Ardak decided it’s time to align her life with her true passion, Art. Driven by this passion and her corporate leadership background, she co-founded ZenART.

“My heart and soul were always with Art, and since my childhood as long as I remember myself, I was dreaming to be an artist. I was painting after work, when I had time, and teaching myself through the books, videos, visiting art galleries and museums. I’ve been very curious about different techniques and styles, and therefore accumulated knowledge and experience on a variety of mediums.”

Read more about Ardak Kassenova in this feature. Say hello to @ardak_zenart on Instagram!