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In this painting tutorial, explore how color choices can create different moods and visual effects. The lesson also introduces the color pyramid, a helpful tool for understanding color relationships and creating balanced, harmonious color combinations in your painting.
Transcript
Whenever we bring up the topic of color, you have to understand that color is so much more than just what you perceive and what you see. Color can elicit emotion.
Red, passion. Blue, cool.
Yellow, brightness. Celebrations typically are accompanied by certain types of colors. You go to a birthday party, it’s unlikely that the room would be draped in dark, heavy oppressive colors. You always look for the brighter colors. Most of the colors can be traced to the three basics called the primary colors, your red, yellow, and blue. A primary color, simply stated, is any color that cannot be achieved through the mixing of two other pigments. They are truly the foundation triad of what all other color blends come from.
The combination, you may remember when you were a youngster in school and your green your blue crayon slipped on to the yellow part of the crayon where you were coloring would form a green color. The combination of blue and yellow would make green. If we were to combine blue and red together, we would get beautiful shades of purple blending and bordering out a little bit of magenta color. So a simple understanding of the basic primary colors will go a long way in helping you get introduced into color theory and mixing. And remember, proceed with caution, relax, and get to know the paints and the pigments, what their limitations are, and understand that you are only limited by your imagination.
In developing my techniques and most importantly, my procedure in getting started with painting, I often go back to the times of when I was an athlete. We would base our calendar year off what we called pyramid training. Earlier in the season, we would do the base of the pyramid, which would be a lot of long slow distance to build up our our wind and to get in shape. And as we neared the season and neared the important competitions, we would refine our training and the pyramid would get progressively narrower, always gearing towards the big, in my case, a track meet at the end of the year.
And so that pyramid training technique, we would lessen the distance, we would up the intensity, and we would focus more on technique and on the fine points and fine tuning of the given discipline that we were going to be doing. That same approach I found works beautifully when we’re painting the bird.
I’ll share with you a little secret. If you were to talk to any of the top carvers or top painters in the world, I think that they would all attest to the fact that we never approach our bird carving with pure total confidence. We always have to work our way into it and it’s very natural to feel that way. We work our way in and as you slowly begin applying the colors and the pigments with the acrylic paints and a layering technique, you’ll find that your confidence will grow with each successive step you do.
Take your time, relax and know that the end result will be well worth all of the extra time you put into the preparation and planning. Speaking about the pyramid training technique, if this applies to the art of bird carving, you can see that at the base of the pyramid, we have our foundation. In this case, I use white gesso and unless the bird is a black bird like a crow or raven or puffin, quite often I will always, gesso the bird with pure white gesso first. I like to do that because that provides the best foundation for applying the colors and gives you a much truer feedback on pure, color reproduction.
Once you get the basic foundation of the gesso in place, then you can move up and quite often I will use the airbrush to put in my shade and shadow thinking of the surface of the carved bird more like that of a landscape surface than the actual surface of a living bird. And I will shade the valleys and I will brighten up the hills to create that illusion of depth. This theory and foundation planning goes a long way in creating the illusion of depth in your carvings.
Most effectively in the breast areas of most birds where you really want to convey that illusion of softness.
Then as you move up the pyramid, you would get into the basic body color.
And say hypothetically we’re doing a red tailed hawk where most of the body color would be in the umber range using burnt ubers with various percentages of modifiers. You would begin coloring the bird to its basic body color shape.
Once you’re pleased with how you’ve achieved that, it could take a day, it could take a week depending on what type of bird you’re doing, then as we get towards the top of the pyramid, we get into what I call the detailing. Detailing can encompass things like feather edging, feather splits, details around the eyes, feet details, anything that would do the final crown jewel, the final topic to the painting of the birds. This is very important because it’s what separates, as they say, the men from the poisonous art form is in in the details. The details, the details, and the details.
So develop an eye for detail, and I think it will take you a long way. And all of this leads us right up to the finished bird and that should be your objective. And, take your time, try not to rush and, and just come along for the ride. So let’s get into some pushing some paints.