[shinji69]

I've seen too many people painting with primary colors, especially after joining the military. -_-; My personal problem is...I always put too many different colors for mixing and end up creating muds or colors that I never intended. Yes, I always neutralize colors with complementary colors and tend to avoid strong colors.

I am just afraid of simply mixing white into any colors to brighten it, so I put complementary colors or sunny orange, and the results are not really good. And I paint space scenes that average color and atmospheric effect really don't apply. Any good advice on this?

[Ahcri]

For acrylic, mix with a bit of water. For oil paint, mix with some oil.

[Briareos]

You can brighten a color without creating a less saturated tint by adding a near neighbor hue.

[egerie]

I'll add a lil' something to what has been said but I can only comment on acrylic painting.

First, avoid using white for highlights and black to make your shadows. It's usefull but be carefull with it. I usually add white Gesso instead of white acrylic when I absolutely need a white highlight.
Glazing can be a good idea too. Either mix your lighter colour with water or acrylic medium (matte or shiny to your liking).

Secondly, when you mix the 3 primary colors you'll always end up with either a brown or (if well balanced) a grey.

Thirdly, if you want to make a mixed media piece with oil paint and acrylic paint, remember those two elements don't work well with each other (oil is lighter than water).. Under layer = acrylic, upper layer = oil.

Hope that helps

[pierre]

An advise would be to start off with fewer colors and successively add more colors to your palette, let necessity decide, not because anyone else have them there.

For example, start off with only black! not too fun, you will find a need to add e.g. white too, and maybe blue, red, etc... as you paint.

This is economically very important too. You can create a grey color by primaries and white for a high economical price. However you could also create a BETTER grey by mixing black and white far cheaper and better option than the former way. This stands for browns too, which can be purchased very cheap.

The color theory makes no difference between acrylics or oil. The only difference is the chemical aspect that does in fact affect the produced color, because of use of medium and blending paints with different chemical aspects. Acrylics stand the pressure of time far better than oils though, which tend to get a yellow hue or crack and so on.(the drying process with oils is very complicated as opposed to acrylics, which suits the concept artist far better because of its drying time)

This painting was done with four colors:
black
white
warm red
golden ochre

four color selportrait by Anders Zorn

[Jason Manley]

great topic and responses....

hehe

that painting pierre is a beauty..excellent example.

also to be considered when looking at limited color palette artists are sargent, rembrandt, velasquez etc...

ivory black
indian red )earth red)
burnt sienna
flake white
and yellow ochre.

life out of the mud....simply amazing


jason