Painting Nature's Moods

Grey Surf under Summer Storm, 24 x 30 inches, © 2010 Katherine Kean. Used with permission.

The American artist Katherine Kean paints the sublime and mysterious moods of nature with a fine touch. 

On her blog she mentions that  she uses cadmium orange mixed with ultramarine blue (complementary opposite color) and a little alizarin to produce a rich and interesting near-black color. 

See more of Katherine's work at her website: www.katherinekean.com

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida

The energy of the brushwork recalls the work of Van Gogh. The orange and blue areas intensify each other.

Ray Roberts

After the Storm

The small touches of pink in these two works, by the American painter Ray Roberts, are very important to their success.
Link to gallery here.

Colours for Seawater

William Ritschel, The Breakers, California Coast, 16 x 20 inches

detail














detail

The turquois green in the waves looks like a mix of Viridian Green and Phthalo Blue (also called monastral or monestial blue).

Phthalo Blue is a cool blue with a bias towards green, making it suitable for seawater. It has intense tinting strength and easily overpowers the mix when combined with other colours, so use carefully. The very small patches of Viridian in this painting really jump out of the overall grey/white palette. Green and turquois have a yellow (warm) element, that should only be used in foreground water, not in the distance. Warm, saturated colours advance; cool, desaturated colours recede.

Below: Viridian and Phthalo Blue

Celebrating a Colour

Atlantic Rollers

A painting celebrating the colour white.
The renowned artists of the past often designed  their paintings to celebrate a single colour, repeating it throughout the entire composition, and adding only secondary hues and tones that support and complement it. White clouds, give unity and strength to the image. A bright blue sky would have detracted from the wonderful detail in the white foam. Tiny amounts of yellow in the foam bring out the blue in the waves.
It probably seems strange to chose a white painting to illustrate the use of colour, but in oil painting, white and black should always be considered colours. There is no such thing as a neutral or non-colour, every colour is altered by those around it.

Frederick W Leist - Australian

Morning Bathers (detail) c. 1928

Our first instinct is to use only cool colours for water. But the reflective surface of the sea can mirror the warm tones of a hot summer day. Introducing warm tones into the water unifies this image.

Jacob Collins - American

As in Hopper's sketch below, the small orange element brings life to the overall cool tones. Classical Realism, to me, means the happy marriage of technical expertise and a strong sense of abstract design.

Edward Hopper - American

Monhegan Houses, Maine, c. 1916-1919

The brick chimneys really make this image. Though almost negligible in area, their orange hue contrasts with the predominant blue, green and gray hues, and makes them visually important in unifying the image.

Ludolf Backhuysen

Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, 1695

Don't be afraid to use black in a seascape; what better to bring out areas of white foam and spray. When choosing to use black oil colour, there are several variations of black pigment to choose from, just as there are different whites. 

Ivory Black is a deep velvety black that is cooler in mass tone, but warm in tint (slight brownish undertone). Lamp Black, a very old pigment dating back to prehistoric times, is also a deep, velvety black but has a bluish undertone. Mars Black is the strongest black and is warm in both mass tone and tint. Usually, for sea and sky, a cool, bluish black would be more suitable than a brownish black.

Many artists shy away from using black at all because it tends to "dirty" colour in mixing, and instead prefer to use a colour's complement to tint or shade. However, using black as a colour, you can avoid ‘dirtiness’ to some degree by taking note of the colour bias and tinting strength. This is where it becomes important to pay attention to the differences in different blacks and how to use them.

Many oil paint manufacturers also produce Indigo - a very dark blue - not as scary to use as black.

Matthew Cornell

Adrift, 7 x 10 inches

Before you reach for that tube of "sea-colour" oil paint, remember: water is not blue. Water is colourless (unless it contains sediment or algae). Only the reflection of the sky on the water's surface is blue (and only if the sky happens to be blue). A painter must learn to unlearn conditioning, ingrained since childhood, about the colours of things.

Don Hatfield - American

Treasure Found, 24 x 36 inches

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Contemporary impressionism. Lovely opalescent colours.

Julian Ashton - English Australian 1851-1942

The Wave, 95 x 274 cm

Art Gallery of NSW

Subtle pink in the sky sets off the emerald green wave.

David Bareford - American 1947-

Brant Point, 24 x 36 inches
With the sunlight at the right angle, water can appear white.

30 x 40 inches
The curves and diagonals of sails, and their reflections or shadows in the water, add greatly to the visual interest of a seascape. Though small, the yellow sails in the distance draw the eye into the painting because they appear as a warm accent on a predominantly cool-coloured image.

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Outbound, 12 x 24 inches
The bright red in the top half of the painting really sings because of the neutral greens in the lower half. Too bright a green would compete with the red rather than setting it off. The red triangle is such a powerful eye magnet that no other visual interest is required in the top half of the image - The blank, cloudless sky is the right choice.

Amy Marx - American

Impending, oil on Paper, 40 x 59.5 inches (image copyright Amy Marx)

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Colours used: Cerulean blue and a light green glazed over Prussian blue.

Prussian blue is that very intense dark blue in the distance.

Some sort of buff colour for the sand visible through the water at the bottom of the painting.

The sea generally gets darker in colour as it deepens away from the shore, changing from emerald greens (and even sometimes warm yellows where the sandy seafloor is visible) to dark blues. But its important to remember that the sea surface also reflects the sky colour, which could be grey, ultramarine blue or even pink.

To see more of Amy's beautiful work:

http://www.amymarx.com/