We were delighted to help sponsor the Mid-Atlantic Plein Air Painters Association’s (MAPAPA) Annual Meeting this year, at the Chesapeake Fine Arts Studio, in Stevensville, MD on April 6th.
It was an amazing day of activity and insightful presentations including painting demonstrations by Larry Moore (in oils) and by Stewart White (in watercolors). Tracey Norvell of Plein Air Magazine gave a talk on Marketing and the Artist.
Stephen Salek, paintmaker and founder of Vasari Classic Artists’ Oil Colors, and I ended the program with a color mixing demonstration and conversation on handcrafting paint. Here’s a review.
About Us
Handmade by Artists for Artists, Vasari Classic Artists’ Oil Colors are the finest handcrafted artists’ oil colors, with more pigment concentration and superior consistency than any other brand available.
A bold statement, especially when so many other brands are making similar claims! But what does it really mean to handcraft artists’ oil paint?
For Steve it has meant an intentional choice to remain a very small company and follow the tradition of small batch milling. Since 1995, he has made each and every color the best it can possibly be, no matter how much trouble or time that takes.
Handcrafting means using only natural brown earth for our Burnt Sienna but also offering the modern synthetic iron oxide for a full strength Transparent Red Oxide with very different mixing qualities and results.
Handcrafting for us has meant filling our tubes by hand and not extending our paint with artificial fillers, etc. for mass production. Our passion for authenticity has meant we do not offer any false equivalencies for colors. Instead we give you truth in labeling and do not enhance or try to substitute our mineral or earth colors with alternative pigments.
Following the tradition of an Old World color merchant, we have for the 24th year maintained our retail showroom with testers of every color to prove the trueness of our paint and demonstrate its characteristics and value to your palette.
Out of sharing our knowledge about the potential of authentic handcrafted paint, comes the following demonstration of what I regard as the three most important attributes of color, especially for successful color mixing. Easily observed, these properties of pigments include the color’s temperature, its physical nature, and its material nature.
Establishing Warm or Cool
I often say that defining a color’s temperature, whether it is warm or cool, is critical to understanding how it will influence and possibly work, or not work, in a mixture.
Showing examples of our Cadmium Yellow Lemon, as my cool mixing yellow and Cadmium Yellow as a warmer yellow, I emphasized that a cool mixing color is one that is somewhat green or moving towards green on a color wheel. Conversely, a warm color is one that is somewhat red or moving towards red on a color wheel.
Why would it matter? When using more traditional colors on a palette, such as Cadmiums or Cobalts, the best rule of thumb is to mix a cool color with a warm color for predictable results.
In this demonstration I set out to mix greens from various combinations of yellow and blue. That meant I needed a cool yellow if my blue was warm in temperature, such as an Ultramarine Blue. It also meant that if I wanted to use the warmer yellow, our medium Cadmium Yellow, I needed to mix it with a cool blue, such as a Cerulean Blue. Above is the resulting green from following the rule.
Breaking the rule of mixing a cool with a warm happens when I mix the warm Cadmium Yellow with the warm Ultramarine Blue. In fact this is a good test to see if your blue is warm or cool, since the warmer blue will not result in a clean green, but rather one that is earthier and more neutral, as in the example above.
But I could mix the cool yellow with the cool blue and produce believable greens. This is because a cool mixing yellow makes greens that look green with any temperature blue, warm or cool, making it an ideal primary for a plein air palette. A cool mixing blue will also make believable greens with any yellow, also a great addition to a plein air palette. You can think of both of these choices of cool primaries as moving towards greens and great for making greens.
Opaque or Transparent
Both of the Cadmium Yellows used to demonstrate color temperature were also characteristically opaque. This physical property of the Cadmium pigment, especially when the Cadmium is a pale yellow can dramatically shift the value of a deeper blue in the resulting green mixture. It acts like a white! We can observe this in the previous mixture between Cadmium Yellow Lemon and Ultramarine Blue, repeated below.
You can determine if your yellow, or any of your other primaries or earths, etc., are opaque by smoothing an amount with a palette knife over a lined sheet of paper, or one that has text printed in black against a white background. An opaque color will cover up the lines with one pass. A transparent color will show the lines below it.
In the examples above, the opaque Cadmium Yellow Lemon is more solid with a definite edge while the transparent Sulphur Yellow has more dimension with lost-and-found edges. Examples of greens mixed with the transparent Sulphur Yellow, are shown below.
Each of these mixtures are deeper in value since a transparent color allows more of the other color in a mixture to show through. An opaque color does the opposite as it dominates a mixture and covers over the other color, just as it does on a test sheet of lines. You can use a transparent yellow to create deeper greens instead of having to deepen a green mixture.
Nuanced or Bold – What’s in that tube of paint?
Besides a color’s temperature and whether or not it is opaque or transparent, mixtures are also influenced by the material nature of the colors used.
The Sulphur Yellow is a modern color based on a permanent synthetic pigment. You can tell because even when mixed with a traditional mineral color, like the Cerulean Blue, (shown above) the resulting green mixture is bright as well as deeper than with the Cadmium Yellow Lemon. That can be useful when you want to bring attention to a passage in the painting.
Modern colors make very clean mixtures and when two of them are combined, then the mix really gets bold and consequently comes forward in space. Let’s bring in a few more of the modern blues and a warmer yellow to compare with the Cadmiums, Cerulean, and Ultramarine we already mixed.
Here is our Indian Yellow, a warm, transparent modern pigment. Add white and it pops. It comes forward in space. Use it to break the rule of cool plus warm and watch a brighter, deep green emerge when we mix it with the also warm Ultramarine Blue.
Mix the warm Indian Yellow with a more modern warm blue, our Phthalo Blue, red shade….It hardly seems like any rules were broken here. A very rich green (shown below).
Let’s try a modern cool mixing blue, our Phthalo Blue, green shade with both of our transparent modern cool and warm yellows:
Again, clean mixtures and lots of brightness but flatter space. Modern pigments allow more freedom in mixing warms with warms and often exaggerate mixtures of cools plus warms and cools plus cools. So how can we have the best of both worlds: clean color but believable space and natural light?
Developing Strategies to Create Space
Bright mixtures that are cool in temperature and are also fairly opaque will create definite edges. To create a sense of light and atmosphere the strategy must include adding warmth and softening or even disrupting those edges. For a form to recede in space it must have lost-and-found edges and a sense of air in front of it. Here are some ideas:
Use a mix of traditional and modern primaries. Try to seek out authentic mineral colors, like our Cerulean Blue, that will act as a modifier to the brighter mixture (shown above). It can only do this if it doesn’t contain any of the modern Phthalo pigment.
Natural earth colors are very good at neutralizing the modern pigments. Here’s a cold bright mixture nuanced slightly warmer with our French Yellow Ochre Havane, a half-burnt yellow earth that is both transparent and warm (shown above).
Sulphur Yellow/Phthalo Blue, green shade mixture + Jasper, shown at upper left.
Sulphur Yellow/Phthalo Blue, green shade mixture + Ship Rock, shown at bottom center.
Use a premixed gray formulated to depict light and/or shadow already at a distance. Our Ship Rock is a warm medium light gray that can push back against the brightness and add dimension and a sense of humidity to the mixture. Our Jasper invades mixtures with deep shadow as it blankets over the brightness and diffuses edges. Both of these grays are opaque so they have the ability to dominate the bright green mixture shown in the images above.
Visit an earlier post for more ways to modify brightness and create a sense of natural light or shadow with our grays featuring Bluff, Jasper, and Cedar.
Questions and Final Thoughts
We closed our presentation to the Mid-Atlantic Plein Air Painters Association by inviting questions and feedback on our colors and approach to paintmaking.
A few questions addressed formulating our mixtures and the time involved to create new colors. In the very beginning we made colors that would appeal to us and that we would want to use. It was also important to us to offer a variety of authentic green pigments, like Cobalt Greens, Viridian, Chromium Oxide, and natural Green Earths, instead of trying to imitate them with mixtures based on Phthalo’s.
One advantage of selling direct to artists is that we are able to invest in the finest pigments and linseed oil, regardless of cost. Although Steve answered, in jest, that it only takes him 3 days to formulate a new color, he wants to emphasize that 3 days is only the 1st test batch. Handcrafting artists’ oil colors is a continuous time and labor-intensive evaluation into each pigment’s characteristics.
We would like to thank our customers for their support and contributions to our ongoing conversation about color and the pleasures of quality paint!
Very informative.
Very informative. Like the play on cool vs warm and transparent with opaque colours.
Hello Kanchana,
Nice to hear from you! Thank you for commenting and hope you enjoy exploring more of the paint posts.
We appreciate your generous support.
Best regards,
-Gail
It was a terrific demo. Thank you !!!! Looking forward to trying out the samples you gave out
Hello Susan,
You are welcome! Thank you for visiting the blog and positive review, we appreciate it.
-Gail
Love the careful description and demonstration, even though it is just on line for me. Your dedication is much appreciated.
Hello Linda,
Thank you so much for your feedback! We appreciate your support.
-Gail
Enjoyed the educated information about colour mixing . It both affirmed as well as offering new creative avenues to take to achieve desired effects! Thanks again Vasari for your commitment to not only colour but to your customers.
Wayne
Hello Wayne,
You are welcome, we appreciate your feedback and generous support. My aim was to make color into a useful tool so painters can control it as simply and confidently as they would a brush or a painting knife.
Thank you again for your kind remarks,
Best,
-Gail
Impressed by this presentation. Would like to receive any more that you create. Will check out your website.
Hello Ruth,
Thank you for your valuable feedback and for visiting our blog. Look under the “PAINT” category and you find additional posts on color mixing…plus more in the future!
-Gail
This information may not make me a world renowned painter (I’m really just a wannabe), coupling this with Mayer’s book I think I’m beginning to understand what this is all about, and how complex it really is. I’ve got 1 or 2 more things to buy, and then I can begin assembling my tubes of paint. Getting the best brushes and other needs has been fairly expensive, but as my father said: Even if you have to wait a little longer, buy the very best tools you find. In the long run you’ll still be using them when the cheap ones have long been failures and replaced too many times. I’ll be using your elemental set as a guide for the standard guiding foundation of my set, and then adding in as time and money permit. With all this free information and actual demonstration of how paints work and how they work together, I’m getting a college course for free. Thanks so much.
Hello Donald,
You are welcome! Thank you for visiting our blog and your positive feedback and insights on materials… we appreciate it.
-Gail
Thank you for this really informative demonstration and explanation! I’m looking forward to studying more like this on your site. I love your paint, have a few of the colors you demonstrated, but now I am much clearer about how/why to use them.
Hello Sandra,
Nice to hear from you! Thank you for the helpful feedback and positive comment.
We appreciate your generous support of our colors.
Best,
-Gail
Thank you for this informative article.
Hello Barbara,
You are welcome, thank you for your feedback and visit.
-Gail
I have spent the bulk of this morning, musing over this fabulous demonstration. It clarified mixing greens as nothing else–including demonstrations and books–has ever done. I especially liked the illustration of modern colors with traditional ones, and when ‘breaking the rule’ seems to work. I have been buying and using Vasari colors for years, and they are my treasures. The idea of your small company, integrity in production of paint, and real craftsmanship contrasts severely with today’s brand of capitalism. Thank you, Gail and Steve, for all that you have done for the oil painting world.
Hello Maryann,
Thank you for your generous support over, yes, these many years! We greatly appreciate your helpful feedback, especially your personal tribute to our colors.
Thank you again for your valuable contributions to our ongoing conversation about color.
Best regards,
-Gail