Secrets of Color - Hue Contrast: DVD excerpt from Skip Lawrence for Artists

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{This video is an excerpt of Skip Lawrence's video from "The Secrets of Color" available for purchase at Cheap Joe's Art Stuff.}


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In this instructional series called Contrast of Color Properties, one of my favorites is contrast of hue. These are the brightest colors you would have on your palette. The idea is that you will contrast these brightest colors for your expressive purposes.

When would you use these? If you looked into the woods and what you felt was not ominous, but a celebration of all the colors of fall (even if it wasn't fall), you could enrich your painting with these colors so that your it was about a celebration.

When would you do it? Anytime you felt there was really exciting subject matter that warranted these bright colors.

The "how" is not to think in terms of light and dark, but to think in terms of orange, next to yellow, next to green, next to blue. Keep thinking of your colors throughout the whole process.

This painting for example was in response to a trip to Boone, NC. For those of you that have not been to Boone it's in the mountains and the roads to get there are somewhat tricky but always beautiful.

I simply thought in terms of "If I want to express this, what would be one way to do it?" By making these colors contrast in hue.

Here's another example of hue contrast with mysterious woods. There seem to be a lot of pure colors here, but there are lots of slightly gray colors in there, too. As you can see variations on this are possible, but the idea is to select the contrast which is most appropriate for how you want the painting to feel.

I also - and this may surprise some - will occassionally stick something in here which is black. The idea of black as being a color is offensive to some people but I don't really understand that. It certainly is a color and I guess you'd say it is a pure color - the purest form of gray I guess.

This area here is getting a bit gray here and that's alright. Your painting doesn't have to be 100% pure color. It's predominantly about contrast of pure color.

We have to trust our eye more than we do. We learn to make decisions based on our acquired taste. We don't buy hardly anything in our lives with a color chart - we think "Do I like it?" and if we do we buy it.

I think we should do the same thing in our painting. I think it would look nice to have this color right there. It's always a guess - there's no guarantees so you try it. Sometimes you're right.

Sometimes yellow will start to mix with things or gets a little too transparent so I'll add a bit of white to it to give it a bit more strength.

White is kind of an enemy of pure color because it's so aggressive. It usually steals attention away from everything else. Most often I will get rid of all white in a painting.

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Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• hue contrast
• color properties
• how-tos
• artist tips
• instruction
• techniques
• bright colors
• feeling
• boone nc
• skip lawrence
• cheap joes

[Amaurer42]

It's nice to see an artist talk about pure color instead of watering or toning it down all the time. I love color! @ Max, it's not haphazard at all. There's no color you can't use.

[ARTISTJAKEHOSE]

Wonderful video, you look like you are having fun :)

[max95655]

I don't have any videos up...

I'm not sure what you're referring to Jessmokun.

[Jessmokun]

Actually, Max, I don't see much of a difference between the way *you* paint in your videos and how he is painting here. You should know that you don't have to spend 30 hours pouring over details to be satisfied with your piece. Time =/= effort, details =/= effort. I'd rather do a piece that takes me 5 minutes but makes me smile than spend a day doing something and hate the end result.

[paintergnome]

to max i would say that while a piece may not be to your liking, its not quite fair to judge an artist in that way. Sometimes the best pieces are those created by an artist who can make it look 'easy and haphazard,' because many years of practice are actually behind it. The paintings in this vid use bright, joyful childlike colors but I get what he is doing and commend him for doing it.

[max95655]

doesn't seem like there's much effort going into this piece. It's very haphazardly demonstrated