Painting Tips: Arranging the colors on your palette

Arrange the colors on your palette: This is a personal matter. The important
thing is to arrange the colors in a way that makes sense to you (and stick to that arrangement.) Then you will at least know where your color is. One useful method is to arrange the paints across the top of the palette, going from left to right and from warm to cool. You move from red, to yellow, to green and finally to blue. You can put white on the left.

Confused about warm and cool colors???? There are three warm colors: Yellow, Orange and Red, and three cool colors: Violet, Blue and Green.

The warm color can be cooled by adding a touch of a cool color, and the cool colors are warmed by a small addition of a warm color. The result is a warmed cool color and a cool warm color. (Easy, huh!)

Here's how this works! Since a painting of a subject and its surroundings actually record a lighting on that composition, all the colors have to be consistently influenced by that colored light. Therefore, if you were to shine a red colored spotlight on your subject matter, a little red color would have to be included in all the color mixtures of the entire composition.

Relating this to your painting, it would seem that you must train your eye to recognize the subtle difference of warm and cool versions of color.

Look at your color wheel (if you don't have one then go buy one right away because they are so valuable in understanding color temperature.) Each of the colors can vary in hue because it tends toward the color next to it on the color wheel. When a yellow tends toward cool green and is a greenish yellow, it is a cooler version of yellow than a yellow that tends toward orange.

As a former student of Helen Van Wyk, this was drummed into me and has followed me through many years of oil paintings and watercolors.

[Submitted by Joan Roster]