Color Thumbs

Unison soft pastel on Cartiera Magnani Velata paper (cream tone, 4″ x 4″ squares), August 2008.

Brian McGurgan

"Colour and I are one. I am a painter."
Paul Klee, 1914. Reference.

Brian McGurgan's color thumbs for our Abandoned Barn Project diverge quite well from my own. He had an early goal of working with neutrals and browns, and I salute his idea of having a color theory from the very beginning of a project. It's always best to have a color plan, or else the colors may get away from you and you'll wander aimlessly trying to resolve your color composition.

Let's review our browns. I think of Umber, Sienna, and Ochre when I think of brown. See a list of browns here. I omit Sepia, which is derived from the ink sac of the Cuttlefish, rather than from minerals. The family of browns based around iron oxides is called earth pigments.

When my mother washed my diapers in a river fed by iron springs, they took on a red color.

Umber, with it's iron oxide component, may have a red field to it. When my mother washed my diapers in a river fed by iron springs, they took on a red color. Vermeer liked his Umber. One may find an Umber with a green cast, however.

Here is the yellow opinion of Burnt Umber. Confused? Maybe the Real Color Wheel people in that link take a systems approach to color. Otherwise one takes the pigment source of the color and arrives at Umber, which is reddened by iron and manganese.

Divide your Siennas into the Burnt Sienna (red) and the Raw Sienna (yellow) categories. Van Gogh valued Sienna.

Ochre is a light yellow brown and probably my favorite of the earth colors. Etymology: ὠχρός (Greek for yellow). I also favor the Brown Ochre made from Goethite, originally used at Lascaux.

Olives are seen by many to be in the brown category, but I arrange mine with the rest of my greens.

Did you know that browns have compliments, too?

Did you know that browns have compliments, too? I have my browns divided very basically into two sections in my palette, those with a yellow field and those more reddish. If you were to put an undertoned ground of green beneath your red-field browns a "pop" will occur. In other words, I would tell Brian in this phase of our project to think about sets of colors or relationships when approaching color ideas for this painting. I often think of a triadic relationship, like red, violet and blue or violet, yellow and green. Perhaps, for these neutral compositions, one might think of a reddish brown, an olive green, and a violet.

Too strict of an understanding of the color wheel may make you think that intensity ought to be lacking in the brown colors. After all, there is no brown on the outer ring of the typical color wheel, and so an artist may conclude that brown is merely the result of mixing two compliments. Actually, there are many very powerful and intense browns available to the pastel artist. I look to my Unisons for these, but others exist, too. The reason they can be intense should be obvious: they are derived from earth minerals, which become pigments. The purer the pigment, the greater the opportunity for color intensity. Having said that, keep in mind that many earth pigments are no longer made with the original materials, but are artificially or chemically produced, or mixed.

Other earth pigments include Venetian Red, Sinopia, Caput Mortuum, Olive Green and Green Earth, White and Black.

Via Handprint, here is a chart of watercolor earth pigments in a chart form.

Last revised 08.01.2005 • © 2005 Bruce MacEvoy

Further Study:

Leonardo da Vinci was a great one for his earth colors.
Also, don't forget Rembrandt.
Thanks to Marion Boddy-Evans.

Also:

Yellow Ochre.
Brown Ochre.
Umber.

Color Studies

This is the promised color study part of our Abandoned Barn Series workshop. We looked at black and white thumbs already.

These images were scanned, printed and then noted with pastels.

Several color thoughts have been presented here. So far, I am favoring the last one, and I want to massage it some more.

Brian's Barn

Conté pierre noire pencil on Cartiera Magnani Velata paper (cream tone, 8″ x 8″ ), August 2008.

Here is the second crit of Brian's thumbnail sketches, and after this we'll move on to color compositions. I have to say that I really admire Brian's enthusiasm in all of his pastel work. For this particular project, he has even gone so far as to buy a couple of new books to support this study. Way to go!

Brian's post, More Abandoned Barn Sketches, follows my Thumbnail Critique of his first sketches, and this project is referenced here in a past post at Pastel (pastelsblog.blogspot).

My Comments:

I like the square format, and your complete elliptical circle around the barn is a good tool for attaching the building to the terrain. Don't make it too perfect, though. In our minds, we want our landscapes to be irregular .

Pay serious attention to the intervals of space given to each element in the overall image. Try this experiment. Put away the photos, and also your prior sketches. Now, draw the scene from memory. Weight the elements for compositional reasons, not descriptive reasons.

You said, "With Casey’s comments on Wolf Kahn and Hans Hoffman I’ve gone back and done some more reading and will continue to explore the “push-pull” aspects of this piece - the visual weight of the sky versus the land masses and also the dynamic that warmer and cooler colors will have within the piece once I get that far along."

You have four bands of terrain, which I like. Several ways to handle that. One is to keep the four, but camouflage two by making them analogous colors and the same value. An important one will be to not make the bottom two bands be equal height (or depth, if you will).

Kahn does a lot with sky colors to either push the eye down upon his buildings, or conversely to allow them to breath and float up. But, what do we do with linear composition to accomplish this?

Here is a sketch I did in Photoshop to arrange the same elements you are using, but giving different weights to each element. The major lines refer to one another, which unifies the scene, and keeps the eye inside the picture plane, and on the barn. A cunning aspect is that the fore and mid (behind or above the barn) ground are roughly the same size like in your sketch, but the balance has shifted to the fore and barn elements because these two elements are drawn a little larger, and the angles are now offset rather than being parallel.

When I used to get crits from the Famous Artist School, the artist would offer these re-drawn sketches. I hope that's O.K. for you, Brian. Sometimes a drawing speaks better than words, huh?

Thumbnail Critique

Conté pierre noire pencil on Cartiera Magnani Velata paper (cream tone, 3″ x 4″, 3″ x 5″, and 6″ x 3″), August 2008.
Brian McGurgan

I won't be doing crits, except by request, and then gladly. Brian McGurgan, of Brian McGurgan's Drawings and Paintings, has asked for one as he follows along with my Abandoned Barn Workshop. What I do hope to do with this series is to post about the Abandoned Barn Project every week at least once a week. Since Friday is Tips, I'll choose another day of the week.

We'll be doing color sketches after the B&W thumbnails, and eventually I'll post my artist's demo as we finish this work in my studio. I started the painting on site, with all of the flavor of plein air work, but I'll be completing it in the studio for ease of teaching from a blog. This whole thing is an experiment for me in teaching, blogging and demonstrating a Work in Progress (WIP).

Brian:

There is no doubt you get the feel of the site, with its lonely and abandoned barn. Maybe you'll have to get me doing some NYC buildings, next, from photos and while I'm in my western studio. I hope to show some of these to the farmers who own the property some time. They'll be thrilled, I know. That distant mountain shows up in many of my own artworks, and I like to tell people it is "almost in Canada" .

You have a great understanding of your aspects, and how they effect the outcomes. I would do several sketches of each (or one) aspect, because the one-each system is too confusing.

I'm glad you're thinking in color at this stage, already. A true sign of a painter! Be willing to change your color ideas as you ruminate on the image over time. I like the brown and neutral idea, but it will dictate certain things down the road, and we'll need to figure that out along the way.

The lower left image makes the barn the star of the show, but the negative space remaining is ambiguous - there is too much of it. And, be careful about getting the barn in the center of the drawing.

The upper left one is an interesting study of what happens when looking at photos (you don't get my advantage of being here to see it in reality). The photo (I call them "evil") flattens perspectives. I have to constantly be aware of this, and stretch the vertical view on my paper to counter this. So, when you lower the horizon line intentionally to include some sky, you fall into the photo-become-drawing trap of flattening the view too much. I have addressed the same issues in my Charcoal Thumbs, but I have kept the hill mass above the barn "fat" to avoid the evil camera perspective effect.

Also, my sky inclusions are for pictorial (linear) purposes, and not for color purposes. I am keeping these two aspects in compartments: first the linear composition, then the color composition. Don't let the color needs screw up the linear composition or failure lurks near.

On the subject of drawings from photo reference, see my post here.

The vertical format is nice because it keeps the loneliness of the barn intact, and yet crowds nothing. A bunch of issues develop here, though. Remember our friend, Wolf Kahn? He is all about Hans Hoffman's "Push-Pull" theories, and Kahn's drawings are a virtuoso performance in allowing lines to push the sky down (or up!) as the composition needs. Same story with his foregrounds.

So, in looking at your third drawing, I wonder which element will dominate. The sky, mid and foregrounds share thirds equally. My eye needs to be told which element to favor. In fact, you risk having four elements equally weighted, if I think of foreground, barn, mid ground and sky. I do like the "fat" field mass above the barn, though. I think #3 is my favorite over all (vertical).

Finally, I want to get into your drawing a bit. The barn drawing works great for it's value scale, and has perfect "weight" and is anchored well to the ground. It's a great drawing! I want you to analyze the perspective as a 3 point perspective, though. It looks like you have a 2 point perspective going, with almost a slight third point (the vanishing point below the dirt would wish for the vertical wall lines to be more acute). Does that make sense? My thumb#3 illustrates a 3 point perspective of this barn, where the viewer is slightly above and looking down on it. The vanishing point for the vertical lines is below the ground level.

Anyone else willing to follow along? I'll be out-of-pocket through Monday, and then we'll be resolving my compositions and moving on to the demo.

Charcoal Thumbs

Abandoned Barn Thumb #1

Abandoned Barn Thumbs #2 & 3

Thumbnail sketches, in charcoal, of the abandoned barn image. Remember that buildings seen from above suggest 3 point perspective. I'll remand you to the search engines to look up drawing perspective. Note, the query "3 point perspective" works better than a query like "drawing perspective".

I find that after you learn drawing skills, it's effective to NOT think too hard about the technical aspects of perspective. Just trust yourself to draw it and the quicker the better - your result will be fresher and more lively. That's right, I said "lively" in describing a building!

Then, after the fact, if something doesn't look right, review your drawing's perspective.

The 3 thumbs above represent a closely cropped version of the abandoned barn scene. And, each crop is a little different, and the results are very different in my eye. I find this image to be simple enough that I won't distinguish between a line sketch and a value sketch.

Going back to this perspective issue, I want to mention that the barn exists in a 3 point perspective space, but the landscape exists in a zero point perspective. The land in much of the American West is rolling hills with mountains in the distance. The artist must organize his lines for the overall graphic needs of his painting, rather than point style perspective. My own bias is to make the lines lead the eye into the painting, and hardly ever out! Upward directed lines at the edge, diagonals and "Z" shapes are helpful here. I also noticed several triangular patterns where grass patches abut the fields and crop lines. They provide interest and direction.

As far as the barn is concerned, my thoughts are to keep it anchored to the earth. Just like figure drawing, ask yourself how the interface of the feet to the ground of a standing subject appear. Believable? Or floating strangely in space?

Next: Color Studies.

Abandoned Barn Photomerge Panorama

Abandoned Barn Panorama - Click On To Enlarge

Shall we share an artistic adventure? Select and view the panorama photo posted above, and bust out your pastel set.

Here we are in panoramic Eastern Washington, about 3 - 4 miles from my house. The subject in this kind of vast and open landscape is, to say the least, a challenge to arrive at in a focused manner. Luckily, the abandoned barn stands out, and it fits into my typical subject-set of buildings and trees.

Follow along with me here at pastelsblog.blogspot as I develop this scene into a finished painting. It may take a while, as I'd like to present it to you as a mini workshop.

And, be my guest at utilizing my photos to work along on your own landscape. Stay tuned as we work on the "Abandoned Barn Project".

Reference #1, Abandoned Barn

Reference #2, Abandoned Barn

Reference #3, Abandoned Barn

Consider this your Five for Friday tips, which is my weekly instructional offering. The tips will dovetail with this long term "Abandoned Barn" project.

1. Feel free to begin any time making thumbnail sketches, preparing your ground (paper) for a studio work based on these photographic images, and let me know if you are participating.
2. I will be starting with Wallis paper. You may do the same, or use what you prefer instead.
3. I want you to have in mind an artist that you will be emulating, or following "in the style of" while you are doing this work. Hint: mine is Albert Handell.
4. If you wish to see my own building images, they are here.
5. I will be posting periodic updates of this work-along WIP. If you link them to me, I would like to post yours, too. Maker sure the photos are reasonably good. I will be posting instruction on basic pastel and plein air as well as studio practices, so you may participate as a beginner or an intermediate pastelist!