Gurney Journey

Writers have played with self-limiting challenges, such as E.V. Wright, who wrote the 1939 novel called "Gadsby" as a lipogram, without using the letter "e." Here's an excerpt: "Now, any author, from history's dawn, always had that most important aid to writing:—an ability to call upon any word in his dictionary in building up his story. That is, our strict laws as to word construction did not block his path. But in my story that mighty obstruction will constantly stand in my path; for many an important, common word I cannot adopt, owing to its orthography."

There are other examples of constrained writing, such as sonnets, limericks, and haiku, all of which thrive within strict limitations of form and meter, or palindromes, where the sentence reads the same forward, such as "Never odd or even."

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Limited palettes are discussed in my book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter.

Answer: The color you're looking at is a consequence of four main factors: 

1. The local color (or surface color) of the object.

2. The relative color of the light shining on it.

3. The relative amount of light shining on it.

3. The quality of atmosphere between the observer and the object.

You have to mentally combine all those factors in order to arrive at the color you will have to mix for that paint stroke.

For example, the girl's hat at left is a medium-value blue because it's a white hat lit by blue skylight which is less bright than the sunshine, and there's much atmosphere intervening.

The underside of her sleeve is a medium dull orange because it's in shadow, too, but this time the white material is picking up some bounced light from the warm-colored ground surface below her. Her skin is a dark brown because it's a light-skinned tan local color in relatively dim illumination. Backlit white subjects are popular with impressionist painters because they make make Factors #2 and #3 vividly clear. 

Most beginning painters see only the local color, because they don't yet recognize how their perceptual systems are filtering out the effects of the next three factors.

Learning to paint involves recognizing how those perceptual filters work. Once you understand them, you can analyze a subject in terms of the the relative influence of the four factors. 

I would recommend setting up a backlit white object on a sunny day and painting what you see. You could use a volleyball, skull, white cardboard box, or t-shirt. The experience of mixing the resulting colors will make these principles vividly clear.

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There's a lot of beginning painting instruction on my new Gumroad tutorial "Color in Practice: Black, White, and Complements." and in my book Color and Light, available signed from my webstore or from Amazon. There's also a lot of information in my book: Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist.

Humans have only three color receptors, but birds are tetrachromats, with four color receptors. In addition to birds, many reptiles, fish, insects, spiders, shrimp, and other invertebrates can see colors beyond our range of awareness. The scientists estimate that as much as 35 percent of the color experience of birds includes colors we can't even imagine, not just additional colors, but combinations of colors such as ultraviolet plus green. 

Some birds that look plain to our eyes have patterns that can only be revealed by translating those extraspectral colors into visible light. According to NatGeo:

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Nat Geo Hummingbirds See Colors Outside the Rainbow

What I’ll do in this video workshop is start with a few basic, inexpensive materials and foundational ideas. I’ll demonstrate grisaille (black and white) painting in gouache. We’ll explore the variations you can get with the contrast between transparency and opacity.

Then I'll paint Greg at his workstation in a tire shop, demonstrating a single-accent scheme based on the Zorn palette (basically, black, white, red, and an iron-based yellow).

The painting developed spontaneously on location and it takes advantage of a raw-sienna colored underpainting.

And we'll examine the opportunities of a complementary relationship using just two colors: ultramarine blue and burnt sienna.

The video alternates between simple practical exercises that are well worth doing, regardless of your skill level, followed by paintings made on location that put the principles into action. I use gouache and watercolor, but the painting insights are universal and will benefit oil and acrylic painters as well. 

What this video does is to take the concepts from my book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter and translate them into basic practical assignments.

The video is 70 minutes long. The download will be $17.99, and the DVD is $24.50, but there will be a launch day sale of 15% off on Monday, April 20.

Tia Kratter, Teacher and Art Director at Pixar and Disney said:
“As an art instructor, I am truly grateful for this approach. Here's why: so many people who want to learn how to use color start out by squeezing every tube of paint on their palettes and end up with a confusion of color. Your method of beginning simply with black and white, and showing that one can get so much variety with just two tubes of paint is excellent. I love how you move forward by slowly introducing new colors one-by-one. It makes the whole process seem so much less overwhelming. Thank you for your generosity of information!”