More Painting with Field Colour

Before I go into my post for today… A note to my e-mail subscribers! Posts coming into your e-mail boxes are now abbreviated (as of January 18, 2008). It is an unfortunate side effect to changing it on my feeds. To see the full post click on the post title and it will take you directly to the complete blog post at the Artscapes blog!

Last week I started playing around with my oils for the first time since last spring. My main medium of choice is acrylics, however, I find you can learn a lot about your painting habits by changing mediums once in a while. I have been using M.Graham walnut oils due to their more environmentally friendly and allergy friendly make-up. The down side is that they are very slow to dry. It means that, for me, these tend to be more appropriate for an alla prima application.

I decided to play with field colour again and I picked up an old image from my photo archive of the St. Lawrence River in January.

Can you guess which field I used?

Because I used a predominantly gray, low chroma and mid to high key palette, it may not be obvious. I used a red field colour made up of cadmium red, alizarin crimson and a touch of cadmium yellow along with the black and white that creates the right side of every field colour palette. I used almost no saturated colour in this piece – only the thin line of light on the horizon uses the left side of the field colour chart (below). You can find most of this painting in the 4th column:

Removing the option to go over top of dry paint forces me to think very carefully about where I apply paint. Although, the slow drying time gives me a chance to reflect that one would otherwise not get with other media. Field colour makes one very aware of values in a landscape and helps make it easier to consider colour value and can speed up the process of making colour choices.

With that in mind, the next oil on the easel will be a snow scene with a blue field colour, however, I plan to add a little cad yellow to that field to warm up my highlights. There are a couple acrylic paintings on the go at the moment, so we’ll have a look at it in the next week or so.

Field Colour

Making a Field Colour Chart