Colour mixing: tone and value

Paul Talbot-Greaves takes you through the basics of successful colour mixing and his colour choices for a late summer landscape in oils, with an exercise for you to try

There are five main value permutations of colour: white, light, mid, dark and black. The main properties of any colour mix are saturation, tone and value. In any one given situation of colour mixing, there will be elements of one or all of these properties happening, often at the same time, so it is important to know just what you are dealing with when you are mixing.

To make things easier, begin by recognising the colour category that you are working with, for example if you are working with green, decide what type of green it is, such as blue-green, green or yellow-green. The categories are defined by primary, secondary and tertiary colours, all of which can be found on a colour wheel – but for the purposes of this article they are yellowgreen, yellow, yellow-orange, orange, red-orange, red, red-violet, violet, blue-violet, blue, blue-green and green. As you become more accustomed to recognising categories, it becomes easier to achieve appropriate mixes directly, without muddling through frustrating trial and error attempts or overworking passages through constant changes of incorrect colour use.

Saturation

Saturation refers to the purity of the colour or vivid colour. Many artist colours are saturated colours, such as cadmium red, permanent rose, cadmium yellow and so on. Some earthy colours, darker reds and darker blues, such as indigo, are less saturated but in the main the majority of the colours you use are saturated. This gives artists the ability to create light, bright punchy passages in a painting, as well as allowing for adjustment to create tone.

Tone

Toned colours are much less saturated and contain elements of grey, generally created from white and black, or from a mixture of other colours that arrive at a similar conclusion, such as French ultramarine and burnt sienna. Think of tones as ‘out of the light’ and saturated colours as ‘in the light’. This easy method can often steer you towards an appropriate mix if you are a little confused about how to arrive at a particular colour. As an example, the process of creating a colour mix for a green field in sunlight and partial shade might go something like this: First, recognise the colour category of the field – is it blue-green, green, or yellow-green? If you’re not sure, trial three colour swatches and hold them against the reference for comparison. When you do this, the answer is often glaringly obvious and forms part of your learning and recognition about colour.

Next, use saturated colours to depict the sunlight, for example cerulean blue and cadmium yellow pale to create the vivid, blue-green that you have decided upon. Where the field is in partial shade, the saturation will decrease, so add a little grey to the colour mix, such as French ultramarine, burnt sienna, and titanium white. Keep comparing the colour to your reference until you arrive at the appropriate tone. It’s important to keep with the same key colour, and to ensure that it shows through each mix, for example a toned green should be grey-green, not just grey.

Value

The value of a colour mix refers to

how light or how dark that colour is. Value covers the whole process of colour mixing, for example sap green applied straight from the tube is about a mid-value strength. Add white and it becomes a light value but add black and it becomes a dark value. Generally, as the value becomes lighter or darker, the colour loses more saturation and therefore becomes toned even further. Shadows are generally dark value, heavily toned colours. Highlights are light value, lightly toned (tinted) colours

involving the addition of white. As you create your colour mixes, the values in your reference will indicate the levels of saturation and tone that you need to be aiming for. Take a look at the value diagram (page 45) to see how a single colour is steered in different ways.

Mixing on the surface

When you become confident with colour mixing, can recognise saturated colour or tone and you can achieve their appropriate values, mixing on the

surface lends variety and realism to the painting. What you must avoid is over brushing or accidentally pulling white from an adjacent passage into a dark value – this is the reason for applying darks first and lights later. Any amount of white picked up from elsewhere in the painting will quickly pollute dark values, turning them into lighter tones and losing the rich depth of colour. If this happens, the only way to reverse it is to scrape off the area and apply the darks again.

Cartworth Trees II, oil on board, 636in (15315cm). This late summer scene combines lots of value contrast, various tones, and a small amount of saturated colour to give the whole painting a strong sense of light

STAGE THREE Next, I worked in lighter tones and saturated colours to balance out the build of the picture. In the trees, I added tones, beginning with my key colour of sap green, then adding French ultramarine, burnt sienna, and titanium white. In the bright green fields, I used saturated colour, concentrating on sap green and cadmium yellow pale with cerulean blue added in places for variety. I thinned the colours slightly with Zest-it so that they gave better coverage, but also because they would be in a slight drying state as I worked on the scene further. At this stage, the painting was quite rough but that was the idea as it gave a base onto which I began the refining stage of the painting

STAGE TWO With sap green, French ultramarine and burnt sienna, I created the dark value shades of the painting and I loosely blocked them in, adding a small amount of titanium white in places to generate a mid-dark tone. I used a size 8 flat brush, which is quite a large brush for the painting size. This was to facilitate quick, loose coverage of colour and value without getting into tight detail too soon

STAGE ONE I began by preparing a board with acrylic gesso, applying two layers with a decorating brush to ensure a good seal with a variety of subtle brush marks. When this was totally dry, I sketched out the scene (left) using a size 3 flat brush and burnt umber diluted with Zest-it. Using the paint thinly, I blocked in some of the darker values of the main shapes to establish structure. The burnt umber dried a little, which allowed me to continue into the painting with an alla-prima approach

FINISHED PAINTING Late Summer, oil on board, 636in (15315cm). I continued working, blending and refining, adding more dark or light value where necessary, but making sure I applied saturated colour where needed and applying tones elsewhere. To finish the painting, I added a few posts and scratched out the wire from the wet paint using the end of a palette knife

STAGE FOUR Using flat brushes of varying size from 3 to 6 I began working with neat paint, constantly mixing and refining the shapes of the trees and foreground. I didn’t explore too much detail as I like my work to have a simplistic sculptural feel. In the track-side verges, I introduced yellow ochre and burnt sienna, which I toned with a small amount of light grey from the palette to generate variety amongst the colours and values. When I was happy with the tree shapes, I applied a coverage of titanium white mixed with a little cerulean blue over the sky