Name: Colour Notes - 10 Minutes To Better Painting - Episode 7
Uploaded: 2025-04-02T09:15:15.000Z
Duration: 10 min 28 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Break out your pocket watch and your paintbrushes, it's time for Episode 7 of 10 Minutes to Better Painting.

Adverbs of manner

I am your dubiously credentialed host, Marco Bucci.

Thompson said, life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.

This episode is about color notes, which falls under the category of taste.

It can be difficult to craft a lesson around taste, but bear with me.

Here's some work by Richard Schmid, a painter known for expressive color.

Look at any of these paintings up close, and you'll find that the objects are made of not flat colors, but a whole array of color.

Color notes can help your paintings gain an extra layer of life.

As is so often the case with art, life comes through variety.

Here's the original painting, and here's a version where the color notes have been removed.

There's nothing wrong with either of these, but if you ask me, the color notes help elevate a picture to painterly heights.

These colors just have an attraction to each other, like positively charged ions, negatively charged ions?

The idea is you start with a flat color, and you introduce variations on it.

Keeping your values close and your edges soft helps the effect stay together.

If I tried it with hard edges and contrasty values, it doesn't look so good.

Also, by allowing the original color to dominate, we can still tell what local color the object is.

Alright, let's investigate some of the actual mechanics behind these color notes.

Here's a sampling of the original yellowy-greenish base color, and here's a note of purple.

Now, to get from one color to the other using the hue strip, I have to slide from here all the way up to here.

That makes it appear that there's this huge chasm between the two colors, and you might be timid about making such a big move.

But actually, the distance between these two colors is not that great.

In episode 5, I talked about how color harmony can be based on grays, and color notes directly applies this theory.

If we completely desaturated both of those, the resulting color is identical, even though there are two different hues.

So allow me to offer you a different way of looking at the color space.

We have our two colors, and let's flip one of these boxes around.

And now, through the gray, we can link any two colors we want.

But, before you get all excited, there are still some questions that need answers.

For example, how can we keep these color notes organized?

Just how far can you stretch this whole gray thing?

How can you trust your own taste enough to know what looks right?

You know, like, what matters and what doesn't?

I went wine tasting in France this year, and my wine educator taught me that the drinking was step 3 of a 3-step process.

The drinking is where you apply your taste, there's no right or wrong, you just go with your fancy, and you like what you like.

But, to inform your whims, the first two steps were all about gathering context.

For instance, the color and opacity of the wine can give you clues as to its structure, like its approximate age, the type of grape, you know, useful information to have if you're serious about wine.

In painting, it's values that give you your structure.

Notice that most of those color changes are just not evident in a value study.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that a variety of color means changing your values sporadically.

No, it's a simple value structure that gives you the leeway to be more playful with color.

And as you can see, Richard Schmid in grayscale agrees.

Okay, back to our list here, which I've updated for our purposes.

This is when you start to gather information about little flavors it might have.

I feel like this is similar to the overall temperature of a light source.

Here are some common light sources on the degrees Kelvin scale.

But you know, forget about degrees Kelvin.

What matters is that different light sources give you different starting points from which to explore color.

For example, in the context of sunset light, your starting point might be way over here.

But you aren't just stuck in that one spot.

You're free to do little hue shifts to neighboring colors.

And when you do these little neighboring moves, I find you can often keep a similar saturation.

You could also venture toward the gray, pick up a few color notes as you do, and pop out into the blues.

These grays by themselves are a little coolish for sunset.

But because they're linked to those initial warms, they can really work as accent notes.

However, if you were to forsake that connection and venture too far, your painting will look less like color notes and more like a color cacophony.

A more neutral light source will have a more neutral starting point, perhaps allowing this kind of exploration.

So armed with context, we can finally indulge in the wine.

Hey, no hard feelings from that last episode.

While the intern is drinking delicious wine, let's look at the delicious notes in this Xiao Ming Wu sunset painting.

The sunset colors are rooted in saturated reds and equally saturated neighboring colors.

A little further back, he moves toward the gray, exploring notes in this range.

And in the very back, he continues that trajectory, finding gray notes that work in context with the warms up front.

The shadows receive their illumination from the environment's ambient light.

And the color notes here follow a similar path, only in a totally different area of the color wheel.

Color notes can come in endless combinations, so it's up to you to explore and find what suits your taste.

And just remember, if you ever get stuck, you can always go back to steps one and two.

Stumbling is another way to find color notes.

So long as your context is well understood, your stumbling will be contained and all kinds of color relationships can happen this way.

Who would have known that being impaired could possibly help art?

Well, switch to water, everyone, because we're headed to part two.

Let's do a little color study of part of that Richard Schmid painting.

My intention here is not to do an exact copy, rather put my focus on building similar color notes.

I'm starting, of course, with a basic value pattern, not thinking about color just yet.

The structure needs to be there before I can build on it.

So here I'm just tinting the canvas to give me something to work out of.

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Colour Notes - 10 Minutes To Better Painting - Episode 7

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