COLOUR BALANCE IN THE LANDSCAPOE

COLOUR BALANCE IN THE LANDSCAPE WITH JERRY SMITH

As Jerry's car unfortunately broke down Di gave us a short talk on the colour wheel while we were waiting for him to arrive. She reminded us of the positions of the primary and secondary colours on the colour wheel and how these can be used in mixing colours, juxtaposing them to get recession or drama in the picture, and their relative colour temperature. She pointed out that the colours of the spectrum were in the same order on the colour wheel and starting with red going through to purple corresponded to colours used to get recession in a painting. She ended with demonstrating how mixing warm and cool colours in different proportions will produce different greys.

We thank Di for stepping in at a moment's notice and giving us such an informative and interesting half hour.

During our tea break Jerry arrived. He began by pointing out that a scene can be as simple or complicated as you like and, by using a grid, part of the scene can be isolated to form the painting. A tonal sketch was then made of the scene to be painted which was then copied using thin dark brown or black paint onto the mount-board.

Jerry paints on mount-board that has had two coats of gesso and one of oil primer.

His colours are laid out and mixed with white to give different tones. The painting began with an overall coat of a mid-tone brown mixed with Jackson's fast drying paint medium 50 : 50 low odour thinner applied with a paper towel. The tree areas were covered with dark green. Then using a baby wipe he removed much of the paint from the highlight areas. Next, using a 1 inch brush, he blocked in dark tones in appropriate colours in the foreground, trees and sky. By comparing tones in different parts of the painting he painted in the rest of the scene so that lightest tones were in the areas nearest to the source of the light and darkest furthest away. He pointed out that the base of clouds are softer than the tops and the highlights on trees are not as light in tone as the tops of clouds.  This was a fascinating talk  and we very much regretted that Jerry had only half the time to deliver it. Perhaps he will return in the future to give us another talk with more time and less hassle!