Change Your Palette and Change Your Paintings

Art School Student
18 x 14

"Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment." Monet.I've never met an artist who is content with the state of his or her work.  Like me, they're always tinkering, tweaking and trying new things in an effort to realize their vision for what their art should look like.  

Over the past couple of months, color has been my focus.  I dropped ultramarine blue from my palette for a while feeling that it had control of me, not the other way around.  It's back on the palette now but in its absence I learned an appreciation for cerulean, a blue of lighter value that leans more towards yellow whereas ultramarine leans red. Cerulean is a natural for pairing with yellow ochre but is overwhelmed and made garish with the cad. yellows, so the loss of ultramarine ultimately led to yellow ochre becoming much more important in my work; proving once again that nothing happens in a vacuum and everything sets off a chain of events - many of which can't be predicted in advance. 

I also introduced cobalt blue, a "true blue" which doesn't have an obvious leaning one way or another and which is much tamer than ultramarine, at least in my hands.  

So the upshot of all of this is a better understanding of the greys which yellow ochre excels at, and a cooler overall look to my paintings.  It wasn't my intention, but that was the result.  

In the painting above, I explored blue overtly, using it as a starting color for the block in and a foil for the muted warm colours in the flesh.  Most every warm color is a much-greyed tertiary, but they pop vibrantly in their context of cool blue. 

I'm learning a lot through my tinkering so I'll continue to explore the colours on my palette and see what comes of it.  

Happy painting!