Mastering Colour 9: Making paintings sing – Using Formal Colour Harmonies

Planning a painting around a formal colour harmony is a great way to ensure that it feels balanced and interesting. Discover the world of formal harmonies and how to utilise them in your paintings in this playful lesson.

£22.00

Formal harmonies may be used to compose a painting or employed at a later stage to balance an existing colour scheme and bring a painting to a more ‘finished’ place. This lesson will guide you through the selection and implementation of a formal colour harmony and the experimental approach in the practical exercise will help to build your colour control skills as you create various values and saturation levels from very specific hues.

Contents: Slide talk, practical demonstration and skill building exercise.
Running time: 1 hr  33 mins
Time required for exercise: 1 – 2 hrs

Materials List

Materials and equipment required:

One 9 x 12” board or A4 sheet of paper
A small flat paint brush, around 1cm or ½ “ wide is ideal, a round brush would also be fine
A palette knife of any size and shape you like to use
Paper towel for cleaning/drying brushes
Plenty of clean water if you’re using acrylics or watercolours
Just one from each line of the following list of colours
• Titanium white
• Any bright greenish yellow – Cadmium lemon yellow, bright yellow lake, bismuth vanadate, Lemon yellow (not Michael Harding’s lemon yellow though – be sure to use his cadmium lemon!)
• An orangey yellow – Indian yellow red shade, cadmium golden yellow, cadmium yellow deep, gamboge, Yellow lake deep
• An orangey red – Cadmium red light, vermillion, possibly napthol red if it is an orangey shade
• A purplish red – Quinacridone pink, opera rose, permanent rose, alizarin claret, permanent alizarin, alizarin crimson, (or perhaps even magenta though that is a bit too purple really)
• A purplish blue – Ultramarine or cobalt blue
• A greenish blue – Phthalocyanine blue lake, phthalo blue green shade, Windsor blue, cerulean blue

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