Speed your painting journey by knowing the best techniques. Brad Teare expands and adds to the best of his Thick Paint Blog-a site dedicated to painting with thick texture.
I will be writing about color in later chapters but I think it's important to discuss a little about color theory in order to understand the next chapters. The terms used to describe the facets of color are quite common and most books about art will discuss them so I will keep my descriptions brief.
Color is commonly described as having three different aspects. The first is hue. Hue means the color family or the local color of that object or dab of color. The hue of sky, being typically blue, will be painted with hues of blue. The blues can be a variety of temperatures, warm and cool leaning towards green or purple, but the hue is still blue.
Another facet of color is value. Value is the lightness or darkness of a color. For example Cadmium Red Light is a very light value red. Burnt sienna is a darker red, a red that is lower in value. Alizarin Crimson is a red whose value is even darker. I sometimes mark the values of my colors, using my nine value grayscale, on the tube with a marker. This tells me the starting value for my color mixtures.
The final aspect of color is saturation (also referred to as intensity or chroma). Saturation refers to the brightness of a color or the amount of gray in a color. For example, cobalt blue is a gray blue so its saturation is low. Thalo blue is very bright so its saturation is high, meaning it takes a lot of white or gray to make the color look dim or grayed down.
Every color has these three elements. Sometimes it can be quite difficult to determine the individual elements of color. Hue is the easiest to determine unless the color is a medium value gray or extremely dark. Using a value finder, which I will discuss later, value is also easy to determine.
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Saturation can be more complicated. If I add white to yellow, for example, that yellow becomes a lighter value. The hue remains the same. But the saturation drops. When you add white to a color the saturation generally becomes lower because the intensity or brightness of that color is diminished. Thalo blue, on the other hand, can appear low in saturation as it comes out of the tube because it is so dark. In order to get it to the maximum saturation you have to add a little white. With a little practice you can begin to understand how colors can be brightened (increased in saturation) using field effects, or grayed, using the addition of complementary colors, dark colors, or white.
