Colour Harmony - 10 Minutes To Better Painting - Episode 5 

thank you for made it :D

OMG this is so funny and yet so educational! WELL DONE! THIS IS JUST AWESOME!

I definitely cracked up on that last part of the video hahahahaha nice.

Love the video! Right now i am reading the book Color and Light a Guide for Realist Painting of James Gurney :). You basically resume a lot of his explanations in your video. I'm happy to have found these lessons :D

:)

Jordan Tai yeep watched so many useless videos and went to many many useless art classes

i only took 4 months of color theory and it was awful as hell

Awwwkward...

You have to go to the right art school. Unfortunately there arent many of them

That awkward moment when you feel like you've learned something but you doesn't do anything

love you man no homo

Super flattering, and hey I’ve looked at your vids more than once for my own #teachergoals!

Sinix Design so true!

You both are awesome! Very high quality content, love your videos!!

Heyyy,,,, sinix here ^^,

haha, thanks :)

Couldn’t have said it better myself

Yeah, that was a great way of understanding the 'relative' element to colour, because it always depends on the other colours around it (which is why blue against a blue background looks less blue than it really is). Our brains view cones differently and process colour differently, depending on the background/nearby colours. In this case, it seems that the not-blue-grey looks very blue relative to the oranges, but if you compared to the blues, then the not-blue-grey would clearly not be blue at all (and, in 'reality', it's not blue to any notable degree, of course -- but that's relative). That is when the video really made perfect sense.

Haha hilarious bit at the end regarding the color wheel being flat - you Flat Earther!!

Sensei !!!

Sensei !!! [2]

Both Ahmed and Sinix on a Marco vid... Man, get proko over here and you have all my fave. Teachers in one place

sensei !

Haha, glad you found me. And thanks - I hope the video will help with your work!

I'm sure it will! Your way of explaining it helps me to think in color. Your little squares and how they fit into the picture really hit me. Thanks for taking the time to make this video. Heh. Now gonna go watch the rest of them! Ugh....my color world is flat.

Thanks a lot! Actually, I have written a book! It's a look at the psychology and nurturing of creativity, and how that feeds into your art. You can check out the hardcopy and audiobook versions here: bit.ly/2EwIMY9 All the best with your work.

Thanks!

shows how OP Marco Bucci is

Hahaha i laughed so much 😂😂😂

katyillustrates hahaha YES those colour blocks were an absolute logistics nightmare to animate in Camtasia! lol. That’s why you only see them move a few times :)

Danny Kundzinsh haha, good way to characterize this series.

Thanks Alicia, I'm flattered that you're sharing my stuff in your class. From one teacher to another, respect :)

Sebastian Wagner That’s a great compliment, thank you!

Always cool to hear from artists of adjacent mediums. Thanks!

Nathanael Burks great!

Thanks, I'm glad the lesson clicked!

Lio thank you!

Merry Christmas

🎅🎅🎅🎅🎄🎄🎄🎄⛄⛄

fearless ax Thanks!

kilerden lol

kilerden why tho? I want to understand :(( 😢

Are we the flat-earthers of the art world? =/c

Adobe never released a real picture of the supposed "round" color wheel, and these ones Marco Bucci is showing are all CGI. Wake up, sheeple...

Thanks a lot!

Wow, I'm flattered - thank you, and all the best with your work :)

Sam Reeves I think that in the first part of the video we totally see that we can harmonise colours even if they're distant in the colour wheel, i think what we wanna do is play with saturation of both colours or just one to make it more fitting in the scene(I don't know if these is correct, it's what I got from the video)

That's kind of what I got too, but I just wanted to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding. Thank you.

I watched the video again, and saw that during the Zbukvic painting, the colors do not have to be in close proximity. I guess my question, then, is do we have to create a stepping stone trail of color from one to the other?

scott Hey Scott - While I’m not sure if I can totally help there, as I lack the experience you have with the slight colour blindness, what I *can* say (echoing Part 3 of this video) is that shapes and value and edge matter more. I’ve had students in the past who struggled with subtle temperature shifts due to colour blindness, and we found that simply focusing on those more important fundamentals almost freed them to use whatever colour they wanted. In fact, it’s almost always true that if you get those right, you can paint whatever-the-heck colour you want, and it will still work. I am saving that particular lesson for a future video, actually. There are some great illustrators who are mildly colour blind, and who are still very innovative with colour. Peter de Seve comes to mind. So while I can’t quite help you train this, I hope I can direct your focus elsewhere, where it really matters.

Simon Kopp Hey Simon, This is an excellent question. You are correct in noting that this colour harmony lesson does not consider the effect of the light source. And I understand how this can seem a little … confounding, perhaps … given that light is what’s responsible for the colours we see and paint in the first place. Light is indeed a consideration you may want to make *before* deciding on colour harmony. In fact, when I was writing this lesson, I did initially plan and structure it that way. Light source temperature -> guiding your colour choices -> producing a natural colour harmony. As you said, this is the process Richard Schmid talks about in Alla Prima. A cool, blueish light (eg. overcast day) will indeed gray down/cool down the oranges/reds/yellows in the scene, while also preserving - or sometimes even adding saturation to - the blues/purples, etc. The opposite would be true in warm light, usually. So by using that as a basis of knowledge in your work, you can actually arrive at a harmonious painting almost “automatically” (I believe that’s Schmid’s word for it, too). With a knowledge of light, you can pre-determine, or anticipate, some of the colours in both light and shadow that you can begin with. “Begin with”. That’s just it. Light can allow you to begin a colour harmony, or even arrive at one kind of by default (and yes, you *can* finish a painting just with that alone. For example, if I am painting quickly, like in my sketchbook - see my painting sketchbook video - sometimes it’s totally fine to only observe the basic properties of the light ... and spend most of your time on composition/shapes/values/edges, since they are far more integral to a good picture.) But in this video, I wanted to demonstrate how colour harmony can be a broader consideration, rather than something that is a slave to the light. Colour harmony can be its own art form (consider abstract painters, who ignore form and light completely. Or areas of Richard Schmid’s paintings that are completely abstract.) For instance, the carrying of that turquoise colour (in my painting) through from the sky->monster->bridge->grass, using it in various degrees of gray. That isn’t a lighting-based decision. It’s finding a grander statement for the colours. Colour for colour’s sake. Same with the Zbukvic and Weistling examples. If you look closely at the girl’s dress in the Weistling piece, there are notes of greyish/blue that sizzle against the more saturated reds. Why are those there? They probably don’t need to be. Weistling could’ve probably just mixed up a cool red and applied that to the whole dress and it would have looked like light. Part of his motivation for those subtle, cool colour notes was certainly that the light is cool, which leads to a cooling down of red (and often when you cool down red you’ll find yourself in the gray purples and even blues), but I think the main reason for all the colour notes in the dress is that they harmonize the two motifs in the painting - the girl’s dress, and the quilt she lays against. Look closely and you’ll find subtle greens and purples in the dress and quilt too. They all bind and harmonize the colours throughout the piece. IMO, this done for the sake of colour alone - the feel of the picture - rather than an adherence to what the light is doing. It’s a departure, or caricature of reality, done for emotional impact. Also consider the bright violet flowers in front of the girl. Those are like the saturated colours on the boats in the Zbukvic painting. They take the a common colour in the painting (red/violet) and take it to its maximum saturation. In that way, this painting carries the colour red through from very gray to fully saturated, giving the painting an overall ‘red’ motif. A red harmony. Again, this is a decision separate from the light; this scene in real life was most likely far less red. Richard Schmid does this too. In his DVD “June” - the one where he paints his red barn against the backdrop of trees - he starts the painting by rubbing a light wash of warm green on the canvas, establishing what he calls a “green harmony”. Schmid here is planning ahead to ensure that one single colour (the green) shows up throughout the painting as a way of harmonizing or unifying (harmony and unity often mean the same thing) the colours. This is a different way of achieving harmony, I did not examine this method in this video! As Schmid paints the barn scene, the underpainting of green starts showing through the gaps between the brushstrokes, and becomes part of each mixture, to various degrees. Green becomes part of everything. Even his bright red barn has green in it. This is especially effective in meshing the saturated green trees with the saturated red barn. Because red and green are complimentary colours, and because both of those colours will show up quite saturated in the finished painting, there’s a risk of things looking too ‘colouring book’. So, having that green subtly ‘infiltrating’ the reds, Schmid achieves a simple yet effective way of harmonizing the reds and the greens, tying together his painting in a way that looking at the light alone would not have accomplished. I remember Nathan Fowkes telling a similar story - about an oil painter who wanted a “yellow ochre” harmony. So he mixed some yellow ochre into each mixture to make sure that the colours all “bent” towards the yellow ochre. Other painters - like Anders Zorn - famously limit their palette (Zorn used only 4 colours), to purposely disallow themselves from being able to mix every colour. That way, every colour you mix, by necessity, all share properties of each other (I highly recommend looking into the Zorn palette for further study.) He could not paint everything the light was doing. He had to interpret it. Limited palettes are great for that kind of learning. A modern painter who does this is Scott Christensen, also a great teacher very worthy of study! In conclusion, remember that in painting we have the ability to take our understanding of nature’s properties (eg. how light works), and push it, heighten it, caricature it. The reason to do this is to capture an emotion. Nature is the raw material, the basis on top of which for us to overlay feeling. That, in a nutshell, is what my lesson intends to get at. Thanks again for the great question!

Very interesting! Thank you for the long and clear answer! I had more thoughts on the topic and I thought in similar directions. Thank you for the clarification!

the Force use Han Solo. As it uses the Jedi. The Jedi can handle it and feel it. And for the purpose of the example, it works great.

Fight this flawless logic I can not.

Hahaha

Thanks!

Thanks!