Mute your colours!

ome painters see paint as colour and they will paint predominantly with high chroma, pure colours. We see this a lot in abstract painting and in ‘colourist’ landscape painters. I can vividly remember when, as a novice, I took my shiny new paints outdoors, looked at the landscape before me and thought ‘how on earth do I get these to say that’. Truth be told, I couldn’t; there was nothing in my palette that resembled the colours and hues around me. As I gained more experience, I learned to knock a colour back by adding its opposite – orange for blue, green for red, and so on – and thus greying the colour ever so slightly. I will also use some