Most Artists Avoide These Colors... The Best Ones Don't!

I can still remember how excited I was the first time I brought home a large canvas from the art store. I had my brushes, I had my paints — which, by the way, were really low pigmented paints, and that didn't exactly help me too much. But I was so excited to put some paint onto that canvas. And I can still remember how quickly I filled it, and how everything just turned into mud.

What I thought was going to be really easy turned out to be really, really hard. I left that room in pure frustration with no idea what I had done or what had caused the painting to turn out that way. So i quickly I realized I had stepped into something way harder than I first thought.

It turns out that most of it had to do with understanding color. Which colors cancel each other out, which ones support each other, how to harmonize them. Little did I know that I would need to understand the the difference between saturated and desaturated, warm and cool, and all of the things you have to understand to make an abstract painting work.

And little did I know that color would lead to more than problems than just mud? Because not so long after the opposite happend — every color I put down was bold and saturated and all of them were screaming for attention at the same time. I was stressed to say the least.

The thing is both problems come from the same place. A lack of color relationships. And the solution to both of them is using the muddy, desaturated colors most of us try to avoid. Most of us have had more than a few bad experiences with them, and we think they're ugly anyhow. 

But once I understood the balance between desaturated and saturated colors, everything changed. Not just in my paintings — in how I felt about painting.

In this week's video I go into exactly why those colors are one of the most powerful tools you have, and how to start using them intentionally so your paintings go from chaotic to sophisticated.

I did a whole video about this on YouTube. Just clik the image below to watch.