Creating With Harmony

Or, new habits are harrrrd!

This is what my palette looked like after a day of painting. Isn’t it just beautiful? All that luscious swirly shinyness. It’s also a little new for me. It’s just a small step away from my usual choices, but it’s making a huge difference visually.

Here is a sample of paintings I have made using my tried and true palette of transparent jewel-tones, which I generally layer in thin glazes to achieve new colors. It’s akin to laying colored gels over spotlights in a theater: blue over yellow gives you green and so forth.

Frankly, I was getting a bit bored and wanted to change things up a bit, use a more sophisticated palette, but I didn’t know quite where I wanted to go. I wrote about some color mixing exercises I’ve been doing that gave me a start of a direction.

I’ve been aware for a while now of a very cool method that Nicholas Wilton teaches that creates color harmony no matter what colors you use, but I hadn’t tried it until now.

It works likes this: Grab a few colors. I used what I call near-primaries; a red-orange, teal and turquoise, which are obviously not really blue, and hence a “near” primary, and a yellow. Squeeze out a blob of each and then take some of every color and mix them all together to make a “mother” color. Then take a small speck of that mother color and mix it back into the pure colors. This gives each color a little bit of every other color, so no matter what you mix from then on, all the colors will harmonize with one another. Basically, you’ve given them all a bit of the same genetic material and they act as a family. It’s actually a bit magical that you don’t need color wheels or fancy theory to get great results.

Here is a swatch page of my palette:

I did not include the pure colors (I just forgot), so what we have here is each color + the mother color, which was mostly green, and then each color + mother + white.

They felt sooo different from my comfortable old clear tones and honestly, I struggled for a few days using them. As you will see in these process pics, after I laid down the first couple layers, I did go in and add some glazes of pure transparent pigment, but then I was losing tonal variance and I knocked them back a bit to bring in more lightness. I love looking back through process pics to see a painting’s progression and remember the decisions I made along the way.

I’m calling her done now and am pretty happy with the results of this method of harmonizing whatever colors I give a go

People often ask me why I use non-human colors in faces and figures. Some are quite pronounced, and though this one is more subtle, it’s for sure not realistic skin tones. I do this quite deliberately: it is basic tenet of my point of view as an artist. I want my paintings to be racially and often gender ambiguous. I want every viewer to be able to connect with my paintings and see a part of themselves, or a loved one, no matter what their heritage or identity.

Thanks for taking the time to read along and share my artventures ! Have you tried this method of creating color harmony? What are your thoughts?