Artist’s Hints and tips
Having taught oil painting for many years, three basic problems seemed to constantly arise with new and inexperienced students. 1. Not mixing sufficient colour 2. Using ultra cheap hobby paints 3. Not replenishing depleted colours on their palettes • I realise that financial constraints are a real concern for many students and amateur painters who may not be recovering their costs through painting sales yet. In my experience poor quality paints are a false economy, as the quantity of pigment in them is less than the better quality paints, so more paint is needed. I have also found that the permanence is often inferior and that the “extenders” used in the poorer quality paints, can reduce the chroma (intensity).
• A premixed palette will help avoid “muddiness” in the colours and encourage good painting “brush work’. If linseed oil is used as a medium the palette can be put in the freezer overnight, and providing the paints are not allowed to skin over, a palette can last up to two weeks or more.
• Very often, colour can disguise tonal deficiencies in our paintings. There is a simple way to determine if your tonal values are okay or not. Take a digital photograph of your painting, without flash, in good light. Download it onto your computer, and use any inexpensive photo processing programme to reduce the colour saturation enough to produce a black and white image. Enlarge this to full screen size and you will easily pick up any tonal problem areas.
• Avoid painting late at night – our colour perception changes significantly. Try to paint under lights that don’t distort your colours. Colour rendering is a term used to describe how closely a light source approaches natural daylight in keeping the correct balance of colours in the spectrum.
• Colour temperature defines the warmth or coolness of a light source in degrees Kelvin. i.e. an old incandescent light globe operates around 3,300 Kelvin, a sunny day 6,000 Kelvin. Ideally your light source should have a colour rendering index of better than 90% and a colour temperature between 5,000 and 6,000 Kelvin.