My Dear Friends,

Hope all is well with you and that you’ve learned something about color and how to mix paint to achieve your desired color.

Today I’d like to bring your attention to a couple of items that are sometimes disregarded or just plain unaware that they have anything to do with a satisfactory outcome of a painting.

Now that we have the fundamentals of mixing colors, we should know some of the properties they hold.  Like warm and cool.

Aha! you say, I know that.  Sure there are warm colors like red, yellow, orange, as well as cool colors like the array of blues.

However, simply put the “temperature” of colors plays a big part in your overall scheme.  Paul Cezanne, the famous French impressionist painter, came to that conclusion and demonstrated that in his paintings.

It is said that he would spend a great deal of time studying a particular scene to determine the exact warmth or coolness of a color that would best place that object at the right distance from himself.

In other words, he discovered that the “cool colors” tended to recede in the background.  While the “warm colors” tended to come forward.  This created the illusion of “depth” in his painting.

I said above that some artists are unaware of this phenomenom and therefore don’t utilize it.  Their rationale is that “a tree in the distance is the same color green as the one closest to me and therefore I will paint it the same color green”.  However, had that color been “cooled” down with a daub of a blue, indeed the illusion of depth would put the tree in the distance its rightful place.
Likewise for the objects in the foreground.  A little daub of cadmium red light will not only “soften” the color but also add “warmth” to it as well.

The other item I’d like to touch upon is Composition.
Too many people are just plain unaware of how much this plays in the overall painting.  It’s also known as “Division of Space”.  It’s how we divide our given canvas.
Rule No. 1-- Never...never place the focal point of your painting dead center.  It sets up a static realtionship and draws the reader’s attention to it while disregarding the rest of the elements.
Rule No. 2-- Never put the horizon line smack in the middle of your page.  It divides the page in half and both halves “compete” for priority.
Same goes for a vertical divide.
Rule No. 3.-- Never run a line, such as a roof edge for instance, into a corner of your canvas. It’s just bad.

For the good stuff, there are a few acceptable forms of composition.  Namely, the “L” composition. either left or right side.
The “Horizontal” composition.  Here you will place your horizon line below center.  Example, a beach scene.  If there is a wonderful array of cloud formation, then you would want to have less sand and more sky.  Conversely, if there is something of attention on the beach, you would want to have more sand and less sky.

Okay, that’s it for today.  I think you have enough to whet your appetite to start cranking out some meaningful strokes with your palette knife.

--Adam