Color Me Converted

experimental practice pays off

I’ve been a lazy painter. I don’t mean that I don’t paint often enough, or that I do it in a sloppy manner; I am pretty diligent and and have even been accused of being prolific. I’m a lazy painter in the way I use my paints.

I will confess to you here and now: I am very often almost always a tube painter.

For those of you non-painters, that means that I squeeze out some paint onto my palette and mostly use it the way it is, rather than mixing my own colors. It’s faster and easier, but it is limited to the colors I buy. I do, however, do a lot of glazing; layering transparent colors on top of one another to create new hues. And I do use whites and darks to get a value (light to dark) range, but I mix those on the fly, on my palette, as I paint.

What I have come to realize, though, is that I have to practice, I have to experiment, and I have to play at this craft in order to get better at it.

While this isn’t necessarily a bad way to paint, I’ve lately developed an itch to use a more sophisticated color palette and move a little to one side of the brilliant jewel tones people have come to expect in my recent work.

Detail from Loving Kindness series

This means I have to learn some new tricks. I have to stretch, experiment, and waste paint doing exercises. Yeah, waste paint; that’s what I said. You see those two tubes of paint in the photo at the top? That’s $30 worth of paint right there! This can get to be a really expensive way to spend one’s time. And because I spent so much of my life having to watch every penny and pinch most of them, I try to waste nothing; not food, not time, and certainly not precious paint.

What I have come to realize, though, is that in order to get better at it, I have to practice, I have to experiment, and I have to play at this craft.

Hoarding tubes of paint in a dark cabinet for years, to be dribbled out drop by drop, is the real waste.

So I decided to dive into color mixing in a serious way and make it part of my daily art practice until I feel like I have some proficiency with it.

I’ve done this in the past in very small doses, usually when I get a new tube and want to see how it works with my favorite hues. I’ve made test swatches on scraps of paper and in sketchbooks. And then the scraps get tossed in a drawer and the sketchbook gets closed and I have no way to find my swatches without going through the whole sketchbook, which usually results in me going down some other rabbit hole even if I ever do find the right page.

There is a better way.

I’ve been a member of Louise Fletcher’s online art community for a few months now and I gotta tell you, I have learned so many tips and tricks to improve my work, and this is one of the most valuable lessons for me thus far. I can’t recommend Your Art Tribe highly enough, so if you are a painter, check it out.

Louise suggests taking the time (and $$$) to practice color mixing using only two colors plus black and white. I had never done that before. She uses these cool little flashcards that come with a ring to keep them together in a pack. I tried it. It’s amazing. And no more searching through sketchbooks to find them for reference!

I was blown away by the number of tints, tones, and shades I could get from just two colors! I mean, just look at this! All that from green gold and primary magenta! I’ve been converted to a color mixer for sure.

In the first group I made, I used two colors that I don’t use much at all, thinking that if I, you know, wasted paint, it wouldn’t be too much of a waste since they’ve been sitting in a drawer unused for a few years anyway.

But then I was so excited by the possibilities that came from my brush that I decided I had to try it with combinations of my go-to palette to see if I could use the colors I love in more sophisticated combinations.

I am finding it absolutely fascinating process. The possibilities seem endless. I am getting very excited about narrowing all these luscious colors down to a select few and starting a collection of paintings that will still be me, just one side-step away from where I painted yesterday.

Wish me luck!