Local Color

by Mimi Robinson

  New York City is a large collection of small places, each with its own personality, mood, and distinctive colors, conveniently arranged in a grid. It is also a pulsing metropolis—a constant flow of moving people, dramatic light and shadow, energy, rhythm, and tempo.

  SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  San Francisco is a city of hills. Approaching it from the Golden Gate Bridge, I see the brightness of the city and the way the light glimmers and shimmers. There are long views from every hill. Sea spray and salt crystals from the coast mingle with the light to cast a glow over the scene. From the steep hills I can catch views of San Francisco Bay. The teal blue of the Pacific is always beyond.

  One of the first things I notice about San Francisco is that it is a tropical paradise: giant ferns and palm trees mix with Monterey pines. Some of the most beautiful plants I have ever seen grow here in sidewalk cracks.

  Wild parrots fly through the trees on Telegraph Hill, blurred glimpses of scarlet and green in the sky. Stairways zig and zag through the shade of dark green sword ferns amidst patches of cerulean blue sky and pink bougainvillea. Small cottages, seemingly on top of one another, stack up along the hill, creating a mixture of pastel grays, whites, yellows, and terra-cotta.

  PORTLAND, OREGON

  Portland, Oregon, sits along the Willamette River, its bridges raising up to let the boat traffic through. Gliding by, the river traffic resembles a modern painting—streaks of blue and red boats, black-and-white barges, and tugboats accented with international orange.

  Small city blocks give Portland an intimate feel, and its old brick industrial buildings, some still bearing faded advertisements, give it a rugged beauty and a sense of history.

  I see pearl gray colors in the rainy sky. Waiting for spring takes patience. In this corner of the Pacific Northwest, the Cascade Mountains trap rain in their peaks, keeping the weather cloudy. February is a gray month. The colors are saturated by the rain: mosses soaked with hues of electric green, tree bark wet with lichen, and the warehouse brick its deepest red. But when the sun does come out, watch out. The brilliance is breathtaking.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Wherever You Go: Field Studies

  It’s fun to go out into the world and look at color. The more ways you look, the more you’ll see. Looking at the different components of the environment or landscape brings out the variety of colors. Each of the practices in this chapter is a starting point, a different door to an experience of color. Feel free to create other practices for yourself along the way. You are developing your own personal color sense.

  BIG PICTURE

  Find a big view. It could be an urban or a rural vista. Before you focus on details, look across the full range of it for how the colors and forms come together to give you a feeling of the place. Distance creates perspective, in the same way that stepping back from your work allows you to see how the piece is coming together.

  PRACTICE

  • Look at the landscape as a whole. Pick out something that interests you and put down that first color, trying to match its value as best you can. Focus on the main elements and simplify; tuning out details will allow you to concentrate on the big notes of color that you first see.

  • Look for big shapes of color, as if the scene before you was a puzzle. Paint the proportions of color—for example, is it 75 percent blue with purple accents? Divide up your paper to reflect the proportions you see in front of you.

  • Observe the layers of color; break the vista into foreground, middle ground, and background. The area closest to you typically has the strongest colors, shifting to midtones as you move back in space, often ending in a muted blue gray in the distance.

  • Sometimes the view is just too big to focus on. A simple viewfinder helps our brains make sense of the chaos. I use a 3” x 3” square and a 2” x 4” rectangle made of heavyweight paper. Hold the viewfinder at arm’s length to find a composition of colors that you want to paint.

  • Capture ephemeral events. While I was painting a palette of a view one day, a bluebird swooped in. I quickly added his intense blue against the lime-green grasses into my palette. It provided a welcome accent of an opposite color and made the palette more interesting.

  • Create a series of three palettes from the same view. If it’s big, break it into sections and do a palette for each section, then look at them side by side.

  DETAIL

  Inspecting small things invites you to look carefully and slowly. Get specific: a color is often not just one color but many shades and gradations. Note the way color changes as it wraps around a form. An apple might have a highlight of yellow shifting toward orange red, then cool violet as it approaches the curved edge, transitioning to a warm purple shadow. There are many shades of gray in a rock, or pinks in a cherry blossom sprig. In every season, there are many wonderful, small moments to enjoy in the natural world.

  PRACTICE

  • Find a small object and explore all the notes of color. From these, create a value study. What are the lightest lights, the darkest darks, and all the hues in between? Keep mixing and trying out the paints until you think you have it right. To create a more detailed palette, try using just one brush width for each note of color.

  • While you’re working, keep your brush loose and your body relaxed. From time to time, step back from your work and get some perspective on it. Walk away and then come back. Turn the paper upside down. You may see things in a new light.

  SKY PATCH

  Let your eyes rest in the vastness of the sky and notice how the colors change from dawn to dusk. It’s wonderful to lie on your back and look up at the sky, whether it’s a starry night or the blue of a summer day.

  Painters throughout history have painted the sky. John Constable, through a lifetime of observation and practice, turned the sky into a world all its own—and came to know it for all its shapes, colors, and moods. Constable’s skies have a lot to teach us about how our landscapes are endlessly changing, always interesting, and what the practice of observing them carefully can give us.

  PRACTICE

  • Do a color palette of the clouds in the sky. If the clouds have shadows, paint those, too. The mist in the clouds is often pearl gray with hints of pale yellow and subtle grays, and the shadows are often purple. See if you can feel their lightness, or their heaviness if a storm is coming, and reflect that in your palette.

  • Focus on the negative space and look for patches of sky.

  • In a city, what colors do you see in between the buildings? In a park, what colors do you see through the branches or between the trees?

  • Paint the sky at different times of day and at different times of the year: dawn, twilight, sunset, the end of a summer day, a winter sky, a spring rainstorm.

  • Note on the back of your sky studies the prevailing weather conditions, direction of light, and time of day.

  TERRAIN

  Terrain (which can include the elevation, topography, and vegetation of a place) is one aspect of habitat. Desert, jungle, beach, mountain, city, and countryside are all types of terrain. The face of a mountain will have different colors than a boggy swamp. The dusty gray-green cactus colors in the high-altitude deserts are far different from the dark-green pine of a Maine forest at sea level.

  Walking in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, I feel a sense of the hillside topography as colors fade to blue and then purple in the distance.

  One of my favorite types of terrain is salt marsh—an ever-changing zone between land and open salt water. The rhythm of the tides brings a variety of color palettes: water reflecting the sky when the tide is in, mud in primordial shades of rich browns and greens when the tide is out, and grasses in green and yellow.

  PRACTICE

  • Wherever you are, notice the elevation. Are you at sea level, on a mountain, in a desert or jungle? What is the terrain like? Is it flat, hilly, rocky? How does it feel under your feet? Is it gravel, cobblestone, asphalt, sand?

  • Pain
t the colors of these features. Try to adapt your technique to the specific terrain. A watery terrain, for example, invites a wet-on-wet technique and soft edges, whereas a hillside with a pattern of trees or a streetscape might call for layering colors that have defined edges.

  ROCKS

  Rocks speak of an Earth that is 4.5 billion years old. I love to hold a smooth rock in my hand—a touchstone through time and place.

  Rocks—round, flat, egg-shaped, moonstones, heart-shaped, with rings around them, striped, speckled—embody what happens to color through the ages in response to such things as temperature, wind, rain, or erosion. To paint the colors of rocks, you need to hone your senses to the subtleties of the colors they contain. It’s a great way to practice mixing colors. You won’t get the color of rocks right out of a tube.

  Built environments, too, tell the color of place: brownstones in Manhattan, gray-yellow volcanic stone in Rome, terra-cotta bricks in Portland, Oregon, and Boston.

  Not only are there colors in rocks, but rocks are colors. The origin of paint pigments started out as rocks in particular places: burnt sienna originally came from a certain soil in Italy, red ochre from a mine in the aboriginal lands of Australia, ultramarine from semiprecious stone in northeastern Afghanistan.

  PRACTICE

  • Pick up any kind of rock—from ones found while hiking in the forest or desert to pebbles found on the street. Note the different colors and striations and paint a palette of the colors you see.

  • Paint a palette of rocks at the beach. Notice the differences in colors when they are wet versus dry.

  • Paint the subtle colors you see in a stone wall or an old brick wall. How do these palettes differ?

  WATER

  Water invites us to quiet our minds. Whether it be an ocean, river, fountain, or pond, water can be mesmerizing. Notice how many forms water takes, from streams to rivers, ocean to mist, fog to rain. Capturing the endless color variations can keep an artist busy for a lifetime.

  Watercolors are a natural medium for painting water. They speak for themselves: pigment suspended in water. Use big brushes and lots of water and move color and water across the page.

  Try using bands of color to give the feeling of the shape of waves.

  PRACTICE

  • Sit next to some water, or look at the rain, a pond, a puddle, a glass of water, a drop of dew. What colors do you see? Lay down one band of color, let it set for a moment, then add another color. Or work wet on wet.

  • Note the big color relationships between water and sky. Try making two brushstrokes that capture the sky and water. On a foggy day the horizon and the water merge. In late afternoon the horizon line might be a dark band of ultramarine blue.

  • Look at the colors in a pond or a puddle. What’s in it, around it, reflected in it, including the sky?

  • Try painting the colors of waves, exploring rhythm and movement. Water always moves, and so should your brush. Create some play between fast and slow strokes. Don’t worry about getting it right—let your brush move with the water. Start by mixing the colors that you see, and make lines of color that reflect the moving water. Keep your brushstrokes loose to express the quality of things that are alive, moving, and flowing.

  COLOR WALK

  Go out with the intention of looking only at color. Clear your mind and focus only on the colors in your immediate surroundings. Soon, your walk will become a parade of color. As you move along, you become a collection of color in motion.

  PRACTICE

  • Bring a small notebook to jot down what you see along the way. Record the date, place, time, and season. Assign a word or phrase to each thing whose color you notice—you will come back to these later.

  • When you return from your walk, open to the notes in your notebook, and take out your paints. Use the words as a prompt to start mixing your colors, and see what you remember.

  • Your first impressions are usually the best, so go with them. For another dimension, paint the shape of your walk—around a city block, down a rambling path—as you put down the colors. From that, make a palette.

  • If you do the same walk throughout the seasons, your palettes and notes will record the shift of colors altered by light and weather.

  COLOR MEMORY

  Artists mine their memories to inspire painting. This is time travel using colors as stepping-stones into your memory bank. To find your color memories, look within to the colors stored in your life experiences, a place between memory, dream, and presence.

  PRACTICE

  For these practices, you may want to work larger, on a 11” x 15” watercolor paper, to encourage a sense of freedom. Limit yourself to twenty minutes for each memory exercise. This is a fun exercise to do with friends and compare memories.

  • Close your eyes and think back to a place or object in a particular moment in your life, whether yesterday or years ago: a summer day in your childhood, the view from your bedroom window, a favorite object, a place you loved.

  • Start by writing details you remember on the paper, or start with the color and add the words later. Beginning anywhere on the paper, fill the page. Be generous with the color. Mix one color you remember and let the process lead you to other colors.

  • Don’t worry if the colors run or overlap, and don’t think about what it looks like. Take that little note of color in your memory and say to yourself, “Was that a teal green? Or was it lighter? Or greener?”

  • If you feel stuck, invite in all of your senses to ignite your memory. The more you do this exercise, the more your memories will flow, so try doing more than one.

  NAMING COLORS

  From the time we were coloring with crayons, colors were given names: blizzard blue, shocking pink, jungle green, cornflower, maize. Names are useful, giving us a collective language. But consider naming colors for yourself, from your own experience, and have fun developing your own personal color vocabulary. Are you painting Maine-rock gray, tree-bark gray, misty-Atlantic gray, pigeon-feather gray, sidewalk gray?

  I like to rename my colors and make them more personal to me. You can also rename colors to make them more personal to you. What has more resonance—Pantone 299 or Point Reyes Pacific Blue? Each place inspires new color names. Every day can bring a new set of names.

  PRACTICE

  • Wherever you are right now, look around. Consider everything part of the local color and part of your palette of place. What would you name the color of the tea you are drinking? The color of the wall as the sun hits it? The No. 2 Dixon Ticonderoga pencil? The colors of your friend’s eyes?

  • What qualities can you use to describe your color names: light, dark, deep, gentle, luminous, dull, soft, transparent, opaque? “Deep scarlet plum” has more detail than “red.” Colors have their own energies and moods: happy, moody, pensive, calm, thrilling, quirky. Combine words and color and see what you come up with.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Palettes to Painting: Some Places

  There is no perfection in painting. It is an ongoing practice that invites you to open your eyes to the world around you and cultivate your sense of curiosity and wonder.

  Through creating color palettes, I look more deeply and intensely at the colors I see, then move them into a painting.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Color Mixing: The Basics

  Color mixing is a key part of developing your color sense. You need to experiment in order to learn how colors interact when you mix them. As you do, you will develop an intimate knowledge of how your materials work together: the ratio of pigment to water, the differences between transparent and opaque pigments, cool versus warm colors, knowing your brushes, and all the nuances of color mixing. By practicing mixing colors, you’ll know what to use to get the color you want when you’re out in the field. Try out pigments from different manufacturers to see the properties of each.

  There are no mistakes. It’s about experimentation—see what happens when you put unusual colors together. Start de
veloping recipes that you like. Take notes.

  There’s a world of resources, both in books and online, about color principles and paint mixing. Here are the basics.

  Limited palette 1 (clear and bright):

  Permanent rose, lemon yellow, cobalt blue

  Limited palette 2 (versatile):

  Permanent alizarin crimson, new gamboge, Prussian blue

  Limited palette 3 (earth-based palette):

  Burnt umber, burnt sienna, Prussian blue

  Limited palette 4 (basic and bold):

  Permanent alizarin crimson, lemon yellow, ultramarine blue

  COLOR MIXING

  The color wheel is a visual tool that helps us organize color in our minds. Create your own color wheels using different triads to create limited palettes. Limiting your palette to three colors will allow you to explore mixing and create harmonious relationships of color. Here are a few basic color terms.

  Hue

  The spectrum of colors that appear in the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, blue, green, violet.

  Primary and Secondary Colors

  The three primary colors are yellow, red, and blue. Secondary colors green, orange, and violet are mixed from the primary colors.

  Tertiary Colors

  The colors formed by mixing adjacent primary and secondary colors: yellow orange, red orange, red purple, blue purple, blue green, and yellow green.

  Analogous Colors

  Colors that sit next to one another on the color wheel, such as yellow, red, and orange.

  Complementary Colors

  Colors that sit opposite one another on the color wheel, such as yellow and purple or red and green. Complementary colors accentuate one another; mixing complements together mutes or grays the color.

  Value or Tone

  The relative lightness or darkness of a color. Having different color values adds rhythm and depth to any painting through contrast and gradation of tones. Breaking down color values helps to simplify a complicated scene.