Paul Talbot-Greaves
CONTRASTS IN WATER COLOUR: 3 OF 6
When I refer to colour I am talking about highly saturated, bright colours, like the vibrant colours seen in a prism, such as permanent rose, cadmium yellow, phthalo blue, viridian and so on. Create a painting with only these colours, using no mixing, and you will achieve an overly vibrant effect, with no depth or contrast. It’s useful to know that you can neutralise a saturated colour but you cannot create highly saturated colours from neutrals. To appear natural looking, bright colours need an element of neutral somewhere in the painting to generate shadows and shade. Most paints are comprised of bright, saturated colours from which neutrals can be made. In terms of looking at the landscape and translating it into paint, the bright, saturated colours are those generally depicted by bright sunlight. Neutrals are depicted by shadows and shades.