How Important is Color?

When I am teaching painting classes, one of the ideas I try to highlight for students is that color is not important. I'm sure for anyone taking a painting class, that sounds insane, but let me explain!

A lot of times when we are painting, our knowledge of color can actually be a detriment to our creativity. In many cases, our eyes deceive us. For example, we all know that a leaf is green (during the summer at least...and still not always). When we are painting, it can be helpful to look at things as they are and not as the color we know them to be. When sun shines brightly on a leaf, it actually looks yellow. That is the color we want to use!

Of course, the most important thing to remember is.....

COLOR DOES NOT MATTER

What really matters is contrast. Light vs. Dark!

We can use any colors we want, but we have to have light to have dark. When I am painting things like trees and bushes, or even mountains, I have learned that it is very important to leave some dark color. If you don't, things can look very flat and turn into blobs of color. If you would like to practice the application of this idea, I have two suggestions that may help.

1. Do an entire painting using only white, black, and a color of your choosing. Feel free to mix the three colors any way you like. This limited palette of colors can lead to some creative choices and open up some new ideas for you. Below, is an example of a painting I did using only black, white, and orange:

   
   
   
   

   

   Perhaps I will offer this painting as a class sometime to teach people about contrast!

   
   
   
   

2. The second idea is to just block in all of the dark areas of a painting first. Do some dark bush and tree shapes, then come back and add some little splashes of color. The dark is almost more important than the light! Often times people will block in areas of dark and light before adding details. You can see an example of this that I got from Art Ignition (https://artignition.com/blocking-in-painting/) posted below:

   
   

   

   
   

I hope this gives you ideas to try and inspires you to think about light and contrast in a way that you may not have before.

I look forward to painting with you!

• - Richard