How do you pre-mix oil colors?

[Bowlin]

In oils, there seems to be two different approaches to mixing your colors for a painting. One is a direct way where you mix it as you go. The other you pre-mix a certain amount of colors that your going to use before you apply them.

With a tight drawing and the values thought out, there's less guess work on what are the appropriate value relationships when you mix the paint for one area compared to another pre-mixed area.

It seems like most artist blockin their paintings either by first one monochrome color (burnt umber, etc.) for values or they block it in with the overall color of certain large areas (for example, a potrait, the face is one color, the hair is another, the background and so on) for color and value at the same time. It seems that most artist that mix the color blockin for one area, come back to that area and focus on it pre-mixing a "few" colors at a time? If you didn't blockin different areas first and just focused on one area at at time (like this Gurney post for example (http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2008/06/area-by-area-painting.html)), how do you pre-mix your colors?

How do you determine how to start mixing the appropriate colors? I mean, do you determine what the local color would look like under certain lighting conditions and start mixing the lights and darks? Or do you start by the middle value, mix lights and darks and then adjust hue and intensity as you go? Or, do you try to think of what kind of lighting is being used and try and get the overall hue and intensity of the object, then mix light and darks? Or is there something I'm missing altogether?

[jrr]

you gotta have a color sketch. this isn't paint by numbers, eventually you'll need to blend on the canvas, even you've premixed colors.

[kev ferrara]

Bowlin... too many question, bro. :)

There's lots of different ways of figuring out value and colors. For one thing certain lighting conditions will have a yellowish cast, and some other might have a bluish one. (Or green, violet, etc.) So let's say its night, and the "tone" of night, from your perspective for the picture you are making, is a kind of mid value gray blue. Thus, the color of a white shirt in your picture will be a mid value gray blue. And every other color will be darker than the white shirt and will have mid value gray blue added to it to some degree. The weird thing is, the eye will notice the "tone" of the color of the light, and will be able to tell red from green from blue, even though each color has been related to the mid value gray blue tone.

So the same thing can happen in a meadow with a green "tone". Or on a gray overcast day... everything gets toned with gray.

But the same thing also happens if you have a yellow light shining on your character, but there's also a blue light coming from behind him. The planes of his white shirt, say, facing the yellow light will be yellow. The planes of his white shirt facing the blue light will be blue.

This is why it is so important to learn to look at your figures as "sculptures cut by a diamond cutter." That is, the planes are like facets of a well cut gem stone.

Anyway... overall the answer to your question is, practice. I know James Gurney and he knows his stuff.... he could probably mix colors blindfolded. He can see a scene, get the "tone", analyze the values and get it down on his canvas first shot.

Which reminds me to say, good color choices are about 75% choosing the correct value. (Which is why doing a brown underpainting to get all the values correct before applying color is such a classic method. One the underpainting is dry, when glazing color on top, if the color is the proper value, if has a feeling of merging with the value of the brown underneath.)

There's also the Riley method and the maratta color scales and various ways of pre-mixing colors on the palette in ready made piles so that they're easily available once the painting gets hot and heavy. Dean Cornwell did this in demos back in the 1930s. (A lot of times, when your palette turns into a muddy mess, your painting is also a muddy mess, or will be soon.)

I painted a lot from the model last year in a room with nearly impossible lighting... so much light bouncing all over the place, that it was incredibly hard to see any form. So I pre-mixed all the subtle grays, greens, pinks, and other soft pastel colors I was seeing before I got there and it made painting under those conditions fun and a lot less difficult!

Overall, through practice you will be able to look at any color shape you see and figure out the value of it, look at the light source and how it shines on everything and determines its color, and then mix your color/value straight away correctly. But it takes getting out the materials and failing forward fast. Just do it.

Good luck
kev

[Qitsune]

Concerning the blocking part of your question, I don't know if you ever came across this thread. I'm not sure why I had such a hard time fiding it, I thought it was stickied?
http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=63899&highlight=underpainting

Edit: I reread it and see you posted in there, oooops, hope it's useful to someone.

[Bowlin]

Thank you for your replies, jrr, Qitsune and Kev.

Kev - That insight on "tone" really helps. I haven't ever quite heard it put that way before, thanks!

I'm thinking perhaps it is the Reily method (http://www.dhfa.net/Artiststatement2.html) I'm thinking of? Gurney often refers to mixing a "string of colors" before he starts the painting. You can tell in Gurney's pics when he does plein airs paintings that he has very few tube colors on his pallet, then mixes a few string colors. Also the Hildebrandt brothers always pre-mix colors. This is generally what I was getting at. They know what values to aim for from detailed drawings, but how they know what hues and intensities to get before comparing them to other areas confuses me.

[Elwell]

I'm thinking perhaps it is the Reily method (http://www.dhfa.net/Artiststatement2.html) I'm thinking of?

That's what I use. It's a combination of a systematic method for mixing colors, combined with scales that allow you to figure out the value range for different lighting conditions. When I'm planning a painting I usually do color sketches, and always keep a sample of what my palette was so I can refer back to it if I have a similar problem. Here are a couple of examples:

451145

451146

451147

451148

[emily g]

Concerning the blocking part of your question, I don't know if you ever came across this thread. I'm not sure why I had such a hard time fiding it, I thought it was stickied?
http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=63899&highlight=underpainting

Edit: I reread it and see you posted in there, oooops, hope it's useful to someone.
This thread is stickied in the Fine Arts, Studies, & Discovery subforum. :)