A Landscape Painter’s Guide to Working with Color – Easel Talk #48
The Sky: Blue With Intention
The sky presents itself in layers of possibility. Blue at the top, lighter as it descends, this is your starting point, not your destination. As painters, we amplify what’s there.
That predominant blue you see isn’t static. It’s darker at the top, always, and lighter at the bottom. Play that up. Don’t use the same blue throughout.
Start with a base mix set aside on your palette, not too light, not too dark. Darken it or lighten it as needed. At the top, add a little more blue, a little less white. As you move down toward the horizon, bring in yellow ochre and more white. Raw umber works to compensate for any greening that happens with Prussian blue. A touch of mixing red prevents things from going purple, though green skies do exist, they’re just not great.
The clouds are always more off-white than white. Play that up. Yellow ochre works, Mars yellow too. Raw umber is one of my favorite colors to bring into light areas because it adds complexity. You don’t want so much that things go muddy, but complexity makes colors feel natural.
There’s a whole range of greys you can move around using umbers, Alizarin Crimson, Rose Matter, ochres, Burnt Sienna, Burnt Umber. You can bring purples into your greys and your clouds. If all you’re ever doing is blue skies, there’s a lot you can do. A lot.
The Land: It’s Not Just Green
We can perceive way more green than any other color. If you imagine the whole spectrum, green would be about two-thirds of it. You have an incredible ability to perceive a vast range of different tones in green areas. You should always be thinking about that.
The color we call green shifts all over the spectrum: grayish greens, outright reddish tones, interspersed with tans and ochres and a vast array of umbers. Break down your average daytime scene into all these different constituent colors to create variety and interest.
Don’t just think, “Oh man, another green landscape.” Yes, it’s green. You need to paint it that way, but with all the colors inside it. Write this down: grayish greens to reddish tones, interspersed with tans, ochres and a vast array of umbers. Those are all the colors you should be jamming in there.
If you don’t see it in reference, that’s fine. Throw it in anyway. A lot of times I go, “Well, it actually isn’t in reference. I just wasn’t noticing it.” Every color has its own unique attributes, regardless of its name. Green can be reddish. Green can be grayish. You can have a purpley green. Green accommodates all sorts of different expressions and deviations.
Beyond the Everyday: Injecting Drama
I don’t often paint typical daytime green and blue landscapes. I like to move things much further and be much more evocative and emotional than the average daytime scene allows.
I prefer doing more dramatic color in my paintings. That’s tonalism at its core, putting a cast and deciding to commit to it. Yellow cast, red cast, purple cast, sepia. One of my favorite tools when I was using Photoshop was the photo filter. In Affinity, it’s called lens filter. It just puts a cast over everything, much like putting an overlay on your camera lens itself.
I’ll inject color based on decisions made on the easel. I might decide, “In this particular painting, I want to go more purple. I want a purple-green interplay.” Or sepia. Or I might decide to play up the reds a lot more. Maybe there’s a spark in the reference. Maybe I brought it up in the reference. But quite often it’s just a decision being made as I’m painting.
Color That Serves Emotion
In my paintings, I’m looking to introduce color that may not actually be present in nature. My reference photo might start as a typical silver, gray and green. If I turn it golden, we’re prompted to feel a more poetic dimension to that scene.
You can do multiple colorations from one reference. I’ve cast a reference photo into different colorations and used it to create different paintings. You could do a blue version. An orange version. A sepia version. A golden version. The sunset version. It goes on and on.
What attracts me to a specific scene is predominantly the composition of the forms. When I’m looking for reference, I’m looking for interesting shapes, for dynamic form, much more so than color. The color is usually brought in by me later on.
The Sky as Color Canvas
The sky in my paintings is where I most frequently bring in the color. My favorite times are dawn, sunset and twilight. You’ve got to be careful if your reference photo is noon and you want to bring in a sunset sky, but you’ve got more latitude than you’d think.
Don’t hesitate to take reference photos when they’re overcast and rainy. Those rainy day skies are usually boring and blast out white in your photo anyway. You’ve got a lot you can do substituting skies in those situations.
I have a huge folder of skies, roughly twenty-five hundred to three thousand, and I’m always adding to it. Some are outlandish. Some I use over and over. I never copy any sky reference exactly. I’m always changing things up. Having certain references feed my imagination better than others.
Once I’ve picked a sky and it’s clicking, that sky determines the colors I cast the landscape portion in. Let’s say I’ve decided on a sunset. I’m not going to leave that landscape all silver-green. I’m going to start casting it into golds and reds so it complements the sky reference. Key your painting off that color-wise.
The Saturation Trap
There is no doubt that working with color is one of the most fun parts of painting. It’s also the easiest way to strike an emotional chord. Put orange against blue. Greens against purples. Greens against reds. Purple against yellow. These set up and strike an emotional chord automatically.
However, watch out for oversaturation. If you venture into areas of extreme color, you need awareness. You’ve got to work up to it. I’ve seen the work of amateur painters striving to get something across as highly saturated, they see those sunset oranges and yellows and push it. The painting fails because everything is saturated. Thus no part of it comes off as saturated.
Start with a rustier version of that orange, something more subdued. Build up to the saturated colors. The saturated colors should not predominate. It doesn’t work, not usually, even in tonalism, which can have very saturated color.
People may look at a painting and think, “That’s very saturated in color.” But the fact is, maybe only one quarter of the colors are very saturated. The rest are supporting players. Think of it like actors, one is the star, but all the others are there supporting. Build to a crescendo. The real key to getting good, high chroma is making sure that not every element is packed with color.
Reference as Tool
The reference image is not art itself. If you’re going to make photos as art, that’s a very challenging process. But most photos are not art.
It’s fine if your reference is over the top. It’s oversaturated, too dynamic, too contrasty. That’s fine because it’s there to stimulate your imagination as you paint. Don’t copy that exactly onto your painting. It almost never works that way anyway. It’s just inspiration.
I have times when I load up the image here in the studio and it hits me, I need to adjust this. I’ll dial it back. Maybe desaturate it a little. Or change the color cast slightly. Follow the impetus of imagination throughout the whole process. That’s the exciting thing about making art. All the myriad decisions add up to the final piece.
It’s generally fine to push the colors in your reference image to crazy amounts of saturation and interest. Max it out. Then maybe back off a little before you start painting. The adjusted color reference image is not supposed to be art itself. It’s designed to stimulate you while you’re painting.
Take good care of yourself. Stay out of trouble. And fight the power.
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