Limited Palette Basics, Sun Shadows Studio Painting by Jo-Ann Sanborn

Sun Shadows

30x40

Sold

Using a limited palette is one of the best ways to gain control over your palette. You will become very familiar with each color you choose and are forced to explore the limits of it’s usefulness to get a full range of value and color in your painting.


Your palette will be purer and your colors clearer if your primary colors contain pigments for only one other color. For example, your warm red will contain red and yellow, and your cool red will contain red and blue. Your warm blue will contain blue and yellow, and your cool blue will contain blue and green. Your warm yellow will contain yellow and red, and your cool yellow will contain yellow and blue.

If you add any secondary colors to this basic palette, you will want to make sure that they are the true compliments of the primaries. If they are they will make a lovely, lively neutral color rather than a dead, flat color. Black should be added to the palette with caution, since it is a subtractive color that takes light and color away. It’s almost never a good choice to darken, and best used purely as the color black.

White can lighten, but it also neutralizes your color. Titanium is a heavy, opaque white used for good coverage, while Zinc white is more transparent. Transparent mixing white is a fairly new color that can be used to thin out and extend your color without neutralizing it.

In today's Everglades painting I’ve used a limited palette of Quinacridone Crimson, Cerulean Blue, and Lemon Medium Azo, Quinacridone Magenta, Ultramarine Blue and Naples Yellow and a Hookers Deep Permanent green to help with the darks, and Titanium White.

You can simplify even further by using only three primaries plus white and still have all the range you need. Try it, and you’ll find that you may produce some of your most colorful paintings.

Process -Reviewing the compositon, building forms

You can see that the light sky is beginning to take shape, and the ground is flattening out. Because my process is a building one, the forms will be painted over and over pushing them into each other and around each other. By painting the sky, the edges of the trees are obliterated, and by repainting the trees the sky and trees will be woven together back and forth until each finds it place on the canvas. The same will happen with the undergrowth and grasses, yet unseen. Fortunately in acrylics this is easy to do, where in oils you'd be making mud.

Here composition is still being defined and strengthened and a dark barely seen in the photograph will help to carry your eye from the foreground into the painting. At this stage I work with a dirty brush, almost dry brush and haven't yet begun to form a color strategy for this painting.

Materials - Preparing Acrylic Supports

Materials – Supports

First decide if you will be using the acrylic paints as water colors, as oil paints, or a mixed media. Acrylic can be used on, and will stick to most anything that’s not oily. If you plan on using acrylics as a water media, paper, or the new watercolor canvas will be your best support and no preparation is needed. If you will be acrylics in a manner similar to oil paints, you can choose canvas or linen, either stretched or on board. Mixed Media could go either way, only making sure that the support will be strong enough to hold any materials and additives you intend to apply.

We’ll focus on using acrylics in a manner similar to oil paints. I most often use professionally stretched canvas since I scrub the paint into the canvas. The professionally stretched canvases are tighter than I can do at home. Linen’s wonderful, but find it stretches too much when I get scrubbing unless I’m using it adhered to a board background. Canvas on board is a favorite, too.

Prepared canvas and linen support are available from a wide range of art supply stores and on the Internet. There are also some terrific small manufacturers of prepared supports. Check out what’s available at http://www.paintonthis.com/ and http://www.dailypaintingpanels.blogspot.com/. These panels come in a variety of sizes and are well suited for small, daily work, while larger, braced canvases may be better for larger studio work.

Once you have decided on your support, you may need to prepare it. If it has at least two coats of acrylic gesso, you may not need to do anything else. However it if has only one coat, or you can see through the canvas when you hold it up to a window, you may want to add another coat or two of acrylic gesso before you begin. This will thoroughly seal the canvas and prepare the surface for the paint.

Start with prepared acrylic gesso, thinned with a little water. It should be about the consistence of a cream soup. The gesso mix should be thin enough to spread easily without dripping. You can apply the paint using a house painting brush. Let the canvas dry completely between coats, and put the second coat on going in the opposite direction. If you are doing very fine work you can sand between each coat, but this is a person preference. I usually order and prepare a number of canvases at a time so there’s always one prepared when I’m ready to paint.

Once the canvas is prepared, you can begin to paint. Some artists like to work on white canvas and others prefer to tone the canvas first. Some us the complementary color of the expected painting, which sets up an immediate vibration. Some like to start with a middle value, and work both to the lights and the darks. My final preparation is to paint the canvas a warm dark, usually purplish. It’s so non-threatening to work on a dark background, and I love to see the painting coming into the light.

Painting of Everglades "Warming in Sunshine"

Warming In Sunshine

24x36

Sold
This is the start of a new blog for the larger paintings that I do in my studio on Marco Island, Warming in Sunshine is one of the completed paintings done this summer in preparation for my show at the Marco Center for the Arts Wine and Art as Featured Artist for August. The show will hang for the rest of the month, and then unsold paintings will come back to the studio and wait to be adopted into a new home.