Workshop Video Lectures - Week Two

The second series of video lectures starts with this lesson on how to paint a limited value study. If you cannot create a good limited value study, then if you use color you will not be able to make a good painting. This technique is not only good for helping you learn, but it is extremely useful for more advanced painters who want to plan a large studio painting.

Have you ever seen paintings that are very colorful, yet the color just does not seem to work? Or paintings in which every color is shouting for attention but no color ever gets heard? The chances are that the artist does not fully understand the concept of saturation.

Whenever you go on a workshop, the instructors are always using the term "temperature". It is used when talking about the color design of your painting, when analyzing the color harmony, and when talking about form. Yet the term can be used in more than one way, which can sometimes confuse beginners.

Whenever you see a great master painting that has a beautiful color harmony, you can be sure the artist is making use of complements. If you do not know what these are, then you will be unlikely to understand fully any discussion on color harmony. Complements are absolutely critical for you to understand if you want to become an advanced painter.

This is a very basic lecture on how to make secondary colors. It is for the beginner artist who has not had much experience of mixing colors. I also will describe a very simple palette: the primary palette, that is great for beginner painters. It will simplify your color mixing, and make it much easier for you to study topics such as atmospheric perspective, because you will not have to worry so much about working with a complicated palette.

Have you ever wondered why some artists always produce the most beautiful work? Why are old master artists like Sorolla so greatly admired by the contemporary painters of today? The answer lies a lot in their use of grays. If you look at their paintings you will find grays everywhere.

You learned the basics about notan in the first lecture series. Now you will learn the most important skill you need to master in order to carry out your notan design. If you do not know how to match values, you will never be able to create a beautiful notan design, neither will you be able to make your painting look real. The technique is really very simple, but it can take months of practice or even years to get right, so start practicing now!

Why do some beginner paintings just not look real? All the right shapes are there, but something about the picture just does not feel right, it looks just artificial. In almost all cases it is not because of the drawing, or even the color. It is a problem of value. Building on the skill you learned in the first lecture series on creating a five value scale, you will now learn how to create nine evenly spaced values. Why is this important?

Perhaps one of the most confusing thing for beginners (and for more experienced painters too), is how to use their palette of colors. This is particularly tricky if you like to use more than the three colors of a very simple primary palette. So how do you start to learn about how to use your pigments?

The final lecture in this second series brings together all the topics you have learned about color so far: values, hue/temperature, and saturation. The most basic color skill of all is "how do you match that color?". This is probably one of the hardest things for beginner and intermediate artists to master. No matter how hard they try, they just cannot get the right color.