Celebrating earth colours

Colour is important to all artists and for me earth colours are amongst the most important in my creative vocabulary. Earth colours provide the perfect foundation to a painting. Think of that yellow ochre or burnt sienna underpainting that artists have traditionally used on their canvases to kill the white and add warmth to the painting as they worked. That’s just one advantage of their use. Burnt umber is also a useful colour to keep shadows and darker areas warm and intriguing rather than dull and flat. It helps to create chromatic blacks with deep, rich tones.

Compare and contrast

Transparency and opacity are the hallmarks of working with media such as watercolour, gouache and acrylic inks but there are subtle differences between them all. Watercolour is naturally more translucent and granulates very easily, while gouache is much more opaque. If you compare the equivalent earth colours of acrylic ink with watercolour and gouache, you will see