Learning objectives
■ Work with just three colours
■ How to add natural detail and texture
■ Build confidence with your brushstrokes
I had great joy in painting these pebbles. Not only are they beautiful in all their shapes and colours, but it is also a great exercise in tonal values, mixing colours and hard and soft edges. This painting was created using only the three primary colours: ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson and cadmium yellow.
Colours
Mixing colours is one of the trickiest aspects of painting. It is all too easy to end up with a selection of muddy colours to apply to your painting and as we all know, mixing the three primary colours will give black or neutral grey, depending on how much they are diluted. By carefully mixing them however, you can train your eye to see the subtle changes in colour made by adding varying amounts of another colour; this is known as the colour bias. Creating a warm/cool colour wheel (over the page) will help with this.
When you purchase a basic setred, making it a warmer yellow, whist lemon yellow has a little blue in it, making it a cooler yellow. If you wish to make fresh zingy greens, using a cool yellow with a cool blue will give you brighter greens as you are only using two of the primary colours, yellow and blue. If you use ultramarine blue instead of, say, Prussian blue, your mix will have a little more red in it and you will, in effect, be mixing all three primary colours (lemon yellow with a tiny amount of blue, and ultramarine with a tiny amount of red), which will give you more of a muddy green.
