As part of developing my practice and improving my use of colour, I spent some time specifically practicing mixing dark colours with new, better quality, paints which would allow me to have more depth in my colours. For this I used Golden Artist Colours, specifically Quinacridone Magenta (PR122), Phthalo Blue (green shade, PB15:3) and Benzimidazolone Yellow Medium (PY154). I started with magenta, and gradually added more blue. From blue I then added yellow to make a variety of greens, and then from a dark green I cycled back through to magenta. my aim with this was to create examples of all the dark colours that I can mix and use in the place of black, using just primaries, and from the chart I can see what colours were used to get there.
This has allowed me to make my paintings dark, like Raedeckers and Shaw’s without everything looking washed out and dull.
These are some examples of the first paintings which I did to test these paints, on 3×4 inch canvas boards. With these paintings I was experimenting with mixing colours with these paints, looking at how they layer and blend and what I could do with them in comparison to other paints which I was using before.
Although these paintings were not initially a part of my project for this year, I found that they were more enjoyable to me to make that the manmade structures I had been painting before.
Something which I struggled with when using these paints was thinning them and also photographing them. For example, the ‘blue’ human skull painting on the top right actually leans much more green in real life, and I could not find a way to get my camera o pick it up as it was, and even with editing in post it does not like how it was intended. Due to these paints being much glossier than those I was using before, the methods I was using to thin my paints before did not work, it would cause the paint to simple bead up on the surface. This same glossiness also made them difficult to photograph, as there were many reflections on the surface. To get around this I would photograph them at an angle and use Photoshop to straighten them out in post editing.
