Dear David,

My question is in reference to “Paint Strings”. I’ve never heard this term before. Is this an oil painting technique? (I’m just learning to paint and I’m using slow drying acrylics if that makes a difference.) Can you one day do a blog posting about making paint strings.

Thanks, Michael. “Paint string” is an oil painting term because other kinds of paint dry too fast for it to be practical. What it means is to pre-mix a series of colors in a gradation from one color to another. Usually, the string goes from high value to low value at a single hue. Typically, chroma is highest in the middle of the range, because that mimics the progression of chroma across objects in the real world, and because that’s easiest to mix.

You can use paint strings in a couple of different ways. At one extreme is to just mix one or two strings that you think you’re likely to use. For example, you could have a string of neutral grays that you use to decrease chroma in mixtures (the best way to decrease chroma with minimal effect on other aspects of chroma is to mix in a neutral gray of the same value). You could also mix a string of “average” flesh color in preparation for working on a figure. Personally, this is usually how I work with paint strings.

At another extreme is a “set palette.” This means that you carefully plan out the colors you will be using and mix them all out before you begin painting. That way, you don’t worry about mixing as you work because the colors are right in front of you. Frank Reilly, for example, was a 20th century artist who taught a set palette method. Artists who work with set palettes often tube a bunch of their most commonly used mixtures so that they don’t have to spend so much time at the beginning of each painting session.

You can pre-mix color with water media, but you need to do something to preserve them over the course of your painting session. I have not tried the new slow-dry acrylic paints and have no real sense of how they behave. With oil paint, it just works that way naturally.

David: In the beautiful work you show on your gallery, are most of the effects achieved with your “thick glazing” technique? I have been experimenting with thin glazes and have run into problems at every turn. For example: How to achieve an intense red or orange, since cadmium colors are out? How to glaze thinly and be able to do fabrics and tablecloths - especially in light colors? How to do a light color ceramic bowl (as in one of yours)? Maybe you could speak in detail about the work in your gallery…

Thanks for the kind words, Julius. Glazing is not my primary oil painting technique.* I tend to paint fairly opaquely most of the time, attempting to achieve the final look of each passage before moving to the next. I’m not dogmatic about that, however, and will go back over a passage, opaquely or transparently, if I didn’t get it right the first time.

I do use glazing for specific purposes. For example, the background of the self portrait in the gallery is yellow ochre glazed over white. Although YO is usually thought of as rather dull, its undertone has a very different character—much higher in chroma and value. That’s one great use of glazing: to avoid “chalkiness” (lowered chroma) at high values.

As far as intense red or orange, here’s how that was done historically. Start by painting that specific passage in a flat opaque color similar to your desired final hue. For example, you could use cadmium red light (historically, this would have been vermilion, which behaves similarly to cad red). Let it dry. Then glaze over it with a similar transparent color such as alizarin crimson (which is fugitive) or pyrol ruby (which is not). Make this second color thick where you want it dark and thin where you want midtones or lights. If desired, paint into the lights with the same or similar colors mixed with white. Let it dry. If the darks are not dark enough, apply another layer of glaze to those areas, perhaps darkened with another transparent color such as ultramarine blue. Over two or three layers, you can get the darks as strong as you like, in a higher chroma than you can get without glazing. I’ve tried this, and it works. For orange, you are limited in glazing colors, but hansa yellow mixed with any of the modern transparent organic reds or crimsons can work.

Does this method allow you to get any color you wish? No, it does not. You are limited to available shades of transparent pigments. But the Old Masters were even more limited, and they didn’t make junk.

As for fabrics, this method works quite well if you have the patience for it. Be prepared to go back into the lights, while the glaze layer is still wet, with opaque colors mixed with white.

Ceramics are easy. For a white ceramic glazed with blue, just paint the object without the blue and allow to dry. Ultramarine or other semi-transparent blues glazed on top are quite convincing (that’s how I did the ceramic cup in the “Three Cherries” painting in my gallery).

This would be easier to show than to tell, but I hope this is helpful.

I posted a swatch yesterday with vermilion and lamp black. Although vermilion and cad. red look very similar, they mix quite differently with black. When mixed with black, cad. red makes dull purples rather than dull mauves as vermilion does.

Many years ago I discovered in one of Velazquez’s early paintings his thumbprints in the paint (at least I thought it was a thumbprint—who knows really?) The thumbprint was used to describe a piece of reflected light on the bottom half of a lime. There was something wonderful about how his thumb had lifted off some paint to reveal the warm ground underneath, and how that warmth acted as the glow of light from the surface the table on which the lemon sits, and how, in addition to it’s representational finesse it still remained a thumbprint like you’d see a five year old make while finger painting. When I put an actual lime in front of me I could see how he saw it and why he came to the conclusion that his thumb was the best tool for the job. I suddenly wanted to paint a lime but not just because of the color or shape or texture but rather I wanted to paint a lime because of how Velazquez moved the paint when he painted one. For a long while I would “see” that thumbprint in all limes… I was channeling Velazquez through a lime!

I don’t think I have anything I could add to that. Go read the whole thing.

That’s not too surprising, because color mixing is kind of complex. I have a whole article on the subject, but it’s pretty long and not really something a new painter is going to be able to digest easily. So here I’ll try something a little different. This article is about how to start learning how to mix paint. It’s for people just starting to paint and people who may have learned some other aspects of painting, but find mixing paint to be an exercise in frustration.

• Practice. Lots of artists have learned how to mix paint without any clue about color theory, through simple perseverance. Keep painting and over time you’ll get better at mixing.
• Simplify. Cut down on the number of paints on your palette. Try two or three. That won’t let you mix any color you want, but that’s a good thing. Until you can control three or four colors, it won’t help to squeeze out 20 colors that you don’t know what to do with. (And by the way, many of the greatest old master paintings were done with six or seven pigments. Total.) Only add colors to your palette after you’ve learned to control those that are already there.
• Simplify some more. As a beginner, you will learn more by spending five hours painting five small simple paintings than by spending five hours mucking around with one big complicated painting. Don’t try to make the kinds of paintings you want to be doing a year from now, make small paintings of just one or two things. No portraits.
• Throw away reference photos and work only from life. It’s hard enough learning to mix the right value, chroma, and hue without the distortions introduced by photos. Later on, once you really know what you’re doing, you may be able to paint convincingly from photos. I’m still pretty bad at that, myself.
• Learn to see color. Any color has three properties: value (lightness or darkness), chroma (intensity), and hue (where the color falls on the color wheel). Always think about colors in terms of those three properties. If you don’t know what color something is, you can’t mix a color that matches it. Value is most important, then chroma, then hue (that’s not an aesthetic opinion, it’s how your brain prioritizes color information). If you’re having trouble mixing the right color, stop chasing the hue. Get the value right, then the chroma. It’s OK for now if the hue is only approximately correct.
• Avoid pretty colors. Go for dull earth colors. Pretty, high-chroma colors are harder to control. You want to start with easy colors, then work you way up to the powerful ones. Especially avoid pthalo colors and other modern high-intensity organic pigments.
• Before you start a painting, you should know what the color scheme is going to be. It’s a great idea to do a very small, very loose color sketch beforehand. Only paint the big masses and don’t try to make a pretty color study. Don’t blend—just paint flat areas of color. Ted Seth Jacobs calls these “poster studies.” They make the final painting much easier, because once you’ve done the study, you know how to mix 90% of the colors you are going to use in the final painting.
• Mix slowly and deliberately. Much of the time spent painting is observation, thinking, and mixing. Application is a small portion of the time you spend painting.
• Figure out what color you want and have a plan for how to get it. If you have no idea how to mix a color, then stop working on your painting and figure out how to get an approximation of the desired color. Again, if you can’t get it exactly right, go for the right value.
• As soon as the mix goes wrong (turns to “mud,” becomes something you never expected, etc.) then scrape it off your palette. Think again, then start over. Don’t keep chasing the color.
• Learn what the paints on your palette do. If you don’t have a good idea what color you will get when you mix two of your paints together, you aren’t ready to make a painting. Practice mixtures until you understand your paints.
• Mix with a palette knife, not a brush. Keep your paint piles uncontaminated.
• Add small amounts of paint at a time.
• Most of the world is lower in chroma than the paints that come out of your paint tubes. Get used to adjusting the chroma downward unless you have a specific need for high chroma in a particular passage. Fortunately, when you mix two paints together, the result is usually lower in chroma.
• Don’t be afraid of strong value contrasts. Let your darkest dark be very dark and your lightest light be very light. A strong contrast of values allows strong modeling and convincing depiction of dimensionality.

I could go on and on, but I’m trying to keep this very simple. Perhaps later I’ll post some more suggestions.

Related posts and articles

• So you’ve decided to try oil painting
• The core palette
• Color and color mixing

Saturation runs on the same scale (often 1-100) regardless of the hue or the value. So the most intense blue, no matter what, is a saturation of 100. The most intense yellow, similarly, has a saturation of 100. That’s very convenient for people who design software interfaces. And if you don’t really understand color, it makes perfect sense. What it doesn’t do is model color accurately.

In reality, the most intense yellow is far more intense than the most intense blue. And the highest possible intensity varies depending on how light or dark the color is. The most intense yellows are found at a relatively light value. The most intense blues occur at somewhat darker values. At very high and very low values, maximum chroma goes way down. But you can always set the saturation to 100 to get the most intense color at the hue and value you have currently selected.

Chroma runs on a different scale. In Munsell, the most intense chroma for yellow runs up to about 18. The most intense blue is more like 12. (I’m doing this from memory, so these numbers might be a little off.) Those numbers change with hue and value, so that the Munsell color space is an irregular, lumpy cylinder. That is a much more accurate depiction of human color vision than the saturation model. It helps to think about color in this way when you’re trying to understand actual color relationships.

Update and Correction

28 February 2008:

David Briggs, in comments to this post, writes:

To clarify, David, my objection is that you seem to be judging saturation as if it was meant to be a measure of colour intensity. It isn’t, it’s a measure of colour purity. The term for intensity of colour of light is “colorfulness”, the product of the saturation of a light stimulus and its brightness.

Many colours reflect light of high saturation, but only those that reflect light of high colorfulness (high saturation AND BRIGHTNESS) have high chroma. RGB colours that emit maximum saturation red light range from very low chroma (nearly black) through moderate chroma (dark ruby reds) to very high chroma (bright red or R 255). The importance of this concept of saturation for painters comes from the fact that when a coloured surface turns from shade into light, the colours of the light reflected from it tend to follow a uniform saturation series such as this.

And darn it, he’s right. Thanks, David. As this Wikipedia entry on colorfulness puts it:

colorfulness is the perceived difference between the color of some stimulus and gray, chroma is the colorfulness of a stimulus relative to the brightness of a stimulus that appears white under similar viewing conditions, and saturation is the colorfulness of a stimulus relative to its own brightness.

I, with my obviously very small brain, still find it most useful to think about color using the characteristics of value, hue, and chroma. But saturation does not mean what I said it does. I apologize for any confusion.

I agree that indiscriminate reliance on high chroma leads to discordant, brassy, loud paintings. But the alternative of matching the chroma of nature is not, in my opinion, the best solution. Since paints have such a limited range of value and chroma compared to nature, painters who try to match nature’s colors exactly wind up with a dull, dim picture. This is most evident in a clear blue sky. No paints can mix a blue that is as intense and yet as light in value as that sky. Only by selectively and artfully exaggerating the chroma relationships and value differences observed in nature can a painter approach the color relationships we see in nature. I’m not speaking here of the expressive exaggeration of color for emotional effect, but simply of painting a realistic picture of the scene before you.

I don’t think there’s much disagreement between us. My objection is to artists who use high chroma thoughtlessly, because they think that a painting that consists entirely of intense colors is “prettier” or more “exciting” than one that is more modulated, or because all of the paints they own are high in chroma and they never learned how to mix them to get a desired chroma.

If I might be indulged in quoting myself, here’s what I wrote in an article on color mixing:

Let me give you an example. I was browsing through art books in a bookstore the other day and found one about the painting techniques of the impressionists. It’s a very well written book, based on lots of research on the individual methods of many 19th century artists. There are a number of demonstrations in which the author copies a section of an impressionist painting, using the methods of the original artist. In every single case, throughout the entire book, the author gets the chroma badly wrong and pretty much everything else right. In particular, almost every color is one or two chroma steps higher than the corresponding color in the original. Impressionists were not known for making dull pictures, but the author felt the need to “improve” the originals by bumping the chroma, even though she was clearly making a serious attempt to use the same or similar pigments and techniques. What’s more, I don’t think she knew she was doing it. I think she believed she was doing precise copies, but failed to see chroma differences right in front of her face. That’s just a guess on my part; some of the pigments used in the typical impressionist palette were fugitive, so she might have been deliberately compensating for their tendency to fade. But if that’s the case, I couldn’t find where she told us that, and she was certainly increasing the chroma even in areas corresponding to those painted with lightfast pigments. So either the reproductions in the book are badly messed up (and no one caught it) or this artist has a remarkable insensitivity to chroma.

I see similar errors on internet forums in which amateur artists post copies of old master works. The chroma is usually too high—often much, much too high. That might have something to do with how the work has been photographed, digitized, and presented on computer monitors, but in case after case, the posted copy appears consistently more chromatic than the original, even when the artist has shown them side by side. The artists usually seem unaware of this difference, and sometimes have trouble seeing it even when it is pointed out to them.

Decker’s example of pushing the chroma in the sky because you just can’t capture the chroma and value in paint at the same time is an excellent one. It makes me think of Maxfield Parrish, who painted skies with high chroma, but never cluelessly.

It’s long, but I think it’s pretty good. You can find it here.

• High chroma colors make up most of the patient’s paintings.
• The patient might agree that a symphony that consists only of high notes would be excruciating to listen to, but thinks that a painting that consists only of high chroma colors is “colorful” and “exciting.”
• The patient doesn’t actually know how to adjust the chroma of mixes. In severe cases, the patient may apply only straight tube colors to your paintings, without ever mixing.
• The patient never uses earth colors.

Please give generously to the International CCS Institute. CCSI doctors are working tirelessly, day and night, to develop new and innovative treatments for this debilitating disorder.

Related article

Color and Color Mixing

Update

23 March 2008: Please note that the Rational Color blog has been transitioned to a forum. Membership is limited: you must apply and be approved. If you are a serious student of art you may want to do that. It is definitely a place for serious discussion of painting.