![]() Remember this when you start painting and know that your mind will play tricks on you, but if you let them, your eyes will show you the truth.ĭepth and mass can be difficult things to show in a flat or 2-dimensional work. That water is mostly yellow! There’s hardly any blue in it at all. We know the lilies are floating on water even though the water is different shades of blue, purple, and green. Look at Claude Monet’s famous lilies paintings: Great painters knew this too and employed it in their work. Hardly any light penetrates deeper than 200 meters (656 feet), and no light penetrates deeper than 1,000 meters (3,280 feet ). Most of the ocean, however, is completely dark. The ocean may also take on green, red, or other hues as light bounces off of floating sediments and particles in the water. Like a filter, this leaves behind colors in the blue part of the light spectrum for us to see. The ocean is blue because water absorbs colors in the red part of the light spectrum. Check out this answer to “Why is the ocean blue?” from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: Hopefully not! Water is a reflective surface and will reflect the colors of the things around it. Go to your kitchen right now and get a glass of water. It’s important to keep these optical illusions in mind when painting, as knowing these things will keep your work from looking amateurish.Īnother hard one to grapple with is water. They just look different because the background has changed colors. Not letting your mind play tricks on you is the fastest way to become a great painter!Ĭolors also seem to change based on their surroundings. We can see that the highlight isn’t actually white. ![]() Is it the same color? Let’s try with our apple: A good way to figure out if an object really is white or not is to hold a piece of white paper next to it. One mistake a lot of beginning painters make is to assume things are white. Notice how the highlight isn’t really white? It seems like it should be until we use our viewfinder and isolate the color. The color is affected by 1) the shape of the object and 2) the light on the object. The first two look pretty red, but the last two look more pink. They will look very different than you thought!Ĭan you see all the different shades of red in it? Let’s see some of them isolated. Hold this up to the object you’re painting and isolate the colors. But the way we see colors and the way we think we see colors are totally different.Ī very good exercise for figuring out a thing’s actual color is to take a small piece of white paper or cardboard, a business card will do, and cut a small square hole in the center. So I’ll paint with red.” What’s wrong with that statement? Everything. One of the most important things I was ever told by an art instructor is “Paint what you see-not what you think you see.” When you start painting an apple, for example, you think, “Well, the apple is red. We talked about this a little bit in Basic Color Theory, but here’s an extended look at colors and how they can affect your painting.Įxercise 1: Paint A Simple Object Using Different ColorsĬolors play tricks on us. Each scheme has a different “mood” attached to it and can make your colors more harmonious throughout the work. Knowing more about color will help you lay out a palette at the beginning of your painting session.
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