​Now we get to explore the magic even further. This is one of the major the practices that I love to do the most.  That is exploring paint colours and how they interact with each other.   Pure magic and so liberating.
 
Today we start with Cadmium Yellow Light as the colour we are mixing into each of the paints we are working with in this lesson.

Many years ago, I did my first set of colour charts.  I was reading Richard Schmid’s ALLA PRIMA II Everything I know about Painting –and more and he talked about doing colour charts.  He said that it took him two weeks to create them all but that the time he saved over the years was immeasurable.  He also mentioned that his paintings took a giant leap forward because he could see the colours he was looking at and how to recreate them.
 
In lesson 4 it’s all about creating your very first colour chart.  We will start with the paint directly out of the tube and add white.   We are keeping it simple. 
 
Now every paint is a different value out of the tube.  Cadmium Yellow Light is the lightest value of all the paints (other than white) that we are using during this course.  It is a value 9, so adding white means that we are only working from Value 9 to Value 10 (white).  This will create very subtle value shifts.
 
But when we get to Ultramarine Blue, that is a different story.  Its value out of the tube is 2, which is dark.  The 6 spaces we are using represent  much larger value jumps of this colour. 
 
There are some other skills that we are developing as we make our charts.  If you are just starting with a palette knife you know how awkward it feels.  That changes with practice using it, and colour charts are a perfect way to ‘practice until perfect’.   The second skill is learning to recognize value shifts, a valuable understanding as we learn to create the illusion of form.

Subscribe on Youtube to keep up to date with the latest of my Acrylic Painting 101 class.  There are a number of videos to come yet.  It is a fairly comprehensive beginner acrylic painting course. ​

In Lesson 3 we start to play with our paint, which is always the fun part!  We will create a test page that explores the acrylic paint quality of transparency and opacity. This is a practical lesson that will help you to chose the best paint options when you go to start a new project. 

I also touch on the idea of "cool" or "warm" bias of paint.  We will circle back to this quality of the acrylic paint in a later lesson.  

Below is the worksheet with all the measurements to create your own chart for this lesson.

Subscribe on Youtube to keep up to date with the latest of my Acrylic Painting 101 class.  There are a number of videos to come yet.  It is a fairly comprehensive beginner acrylic painting course. ​

This is a very short lesson.  I discovered over the years that knowing what information is on your paint tubes helps to save money!  It helps to know if the paint  is made with one pigment or multiple pigments.  When mixing paint the more pigments the more complex it is.  I try to keep to working with single pigment paint colours, tho there are some exceptions.  The one exception is Alizarin Crimson Permanent Hue.  I did a test on the various options and chose to use the brand Liquitex for this pigment.   

Subscribe on Youtube to keep up to date with the latest of my Acrylic Painting 101 class.  There are a number of videos to come yet.  It is a fairly comprehensive course. ​