June Palette Update, colour saturation

If you followed last year you know I posted regular palette cleanser paintings that were a lot of fun. I plan to do those again using the Van Gogh student paints and a new pad of the same watercolour paper I had used from Fabriano. This one was just a quick sketch made as I prepared the new paint out for June's palette update.
 

Canary Condo Island,  sketchbook, watercolour 9 x 6" 2021

 

I am still using the 18 slot Holbein palette, it is an exact model that I had used for over 5 years. The old one was being held together with duct tape, aluminum wire, and had developed cracks after the winter painting. Apparently they don't design watercolour palettes for sub zero temperatures. The paint choice and ordering has been tweaked a little. Perylene red is up with the earth colours, I use it to increase the chroma on the red earth paints, or to make a red shadow if the object is red. I brought PG7 back, it is superb for making turquoise, and for greening up any mixture. A lighter, yellower orange (PO62) replaces the duller redder orange I had for mixing greens (PO36). Finally, I found a spot for pyrole red ferrari (PR255) just above its buddy pyrole red fire engine (PR254).

Out of curiosity I wanted to find out what was the saturated hue looked like for the blue and green paints, partly because the scientist in me recently deconstructed the colour of a rolling hill.  Here are the colour picks with maximum saturation digitally enhanced with Image J.

 Perylene green (PBk31):

Phthalo green yellow shade (PG36):

Phthalo green blue shade (PG7):

 

Phthalo blue Sapphire (PB15):

Cobalt Blue (PB28):

Indothrone blue (PB60):

What to make of this? The first one PBk31 perylene green appears to be the greenest of the lot, even though it appears to be a dark almost black paint. The phthalo greens are similar, both have a teal/turquoise tint. The phthalo blue and cobalt blue are very similar, while the indo blue is a true blue (not a blue violet really). The hue range is narrower than I thought- so to make dark chartreuse I need to add yellow to perylene green, and to make dark neutral blue violet requires some quinacridone magenta. Of course, you can never get the type of saturation you see in the digital images above, unless the paint contains additives. There is a new kind of paint they are marketing as super bright, but I noticed the adverts shine incredibly bright spot lights on the works, that is a known trick that galleries use to fool customers into seeing bright colours.

Two Flowering Trees

 

Here are two interesting trees in front of Joe and Ralph Auto on Walkley street. To capture the effect of blossoms I started with a neutral chartreuse (greenish yellow) wash with an umber shadow in the shape of the tree. As it dried I built up the textures of the leaves using a half inch filbert and sideways brush strokes. By leaving the initial wash showing in large sections, the tree has the illusion of flowers growing amongst the foliage. The auto building is seen just on the left, it was done with caput mortum (PR101), healthy doses of ferrari red (PR255) and perylene maroon for the shadow, and a touch of black. I squeezed in a turquoise car in the bottom right, it helps with the depth perception, composition, and the colour plays well off the sky and the variety of greens in the painting.

Flowering Trees, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, June 2021 (No. 2688)

One Less Secret, one Less Shadow

 As an artist, when you see something worth painting you have to paint it. Last year I discovered a secret place, away from the crowd it was a pristine hillside populated with a variety of wildflowers, burr plants, insects, birds, and butterflies. With the Turcot work, access was fenced off, and today my worst suspicions came true. In the painting, I am standing where the hillside used to be, all that remains is a steep slope of clay devoid of life, a moonscape. Their beloved condo development right next to the highway can be seen in the left of the picture, and a surviving shrub on the top right. The only possible silver lining is that this is part of the promised forested park path. I guess you cant let nature get in the way of making green spaces. I had a tear in my eye painting this one. As you can tell from the painting, there was another name I had in mind, but renamed it for the blog...

One Less Secret, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, June 2021 (No. 2691)

In case you missed the link here is what it looked like last year, as seen from above. I was very careful when I made this painting not to trample the natural growth... 

 To clear my head a little I rode down the Maisonneuve bike path, and came across the location where I painted a tree on Benny Av, way back in 2019. It looked like an old tree, covered in moss, so it probably was on its last legs anyways. A lot of trees were lost in Montreal due to the invasive worms, I did a painting called one less shadow the other day, since trees provide shade, oxygen, habitat and painting subjects. The old tree was gone, just a stump remained. There was a massive thunderstorm brewing which contributed to the atmosphere and hastened my painting speed. Luckily I finished and rode home in some mild rain before it really came down. Together with the other painting of a tree stump, this makes 2 less shadows. The school where this is located was actually planting a bunch of new stuff, so the wheel keeps turning.

 2 Less Shadows, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, June 2021 (No. 2692)

Distant Blues, Pink Wildflowers

 

The day started with a bike ride up the mountain from the northwest side, which takes you to the U de M campus. After pondering how to paint distant blues, it was time to put theory to the test. I started with a base of indo blue (PB60) with touches of phthalo blue-green (PG7) and carbon black (PBk6). The closer the foliage was, I added more benzi yellow (PY154), phthalo green (PG36), and perylene green (PBk31) for shadows. Colours aside, the strategy was to create neutralized blue on the horizon, and gradually move it to a saturated chartreuse in the foreground. One problem I noticed, the indo blue and carbon black become much lighter when they dry, so I need to apply it darker. The walking sign was embellished a little, its a lively walker! When I arrived at the top of the hill on my bike, one of the 'professional' cyclists gave me a thumbs up for encouragement. They probably go up and down all day without breaking a sweat.

Université de Montréal, Arrêt, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, June 2021 (No. 2689)

This view was looking northwards, I could see even further and wider into the horizon. I worked from bottom to top and tried to amplify blue yellow contrasts. The buildings in the distance were done using the neutral blue-violet that I worked out in the last blog post. Sure enough, the buildings look brick red even though they aren't painted with brick red. On the left is one of the faces of a tall building, it was done with yellow ochre (PY43) and touches of umber. I was standing on a ridge, close to one of the entrances to École Polytechnique. That is where the 1989 misogynist terrorist mass shooting took place. It was a sombre reminder. I emphasized the pink wildflowers to symbolize the women who lost their lives that day.

Université de Montréal, Les Fleurs Sauvages Roses 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, June 2021 (No. 2690)

Colours Can't Believe my Eyes

For the next few world inspired landscapes the designs call for rolling hills that fade into atmospheric blue. Getting the colour correct on this kind of effect is tough, most artists know that mountains become blue towards the distant horizon and can replicate it with blue paint, for example a Sutton painting from last year. But it has never looked quite right to my eye when I painted those kinds of rolling hills. In the test paintings above (Back of No. 2996 Urban Jungle), the mountains dotted with shrubs look smokey or foggy but not atmospheric blue. In the Sutton painting I linked, the colours look a little too artificial. To resolve the issue I downloaded a beautiful photo from publicdomainpictures.net taken by Linnaea Mallette in Yosemite National Park USA which you see here....

Clearly, the mountains in the distant background have a blue-grey tint, while the rocks and shrubs in the foreground appear to be warmer colours like beige, orange and green. But what about the mountain in the middle ground, the one that appears in center of the photo? To my eye, it appears to be a dark green, with little patches of earthy violet or red rocks, at least, that would be how I would paint it... neutralized viridian and the new iron oxide violet perhaps. But a close inspection reveals a few surprises...

Above is a close up of the central mountain. I am still seeing green pine trees and purple-brownish rocks, albeit with a grey or blue haze. The caption of the photo said 'purple mountains'.

This is even closer, zoomed in, I hovered the mouse over one of the 'green' pine trees in the crop, and the colour picker showed that it was in fact, blue. The colour was a desaturated greyish blue, but still a true blue, not a trace of green or purple.

 

Next I checked what colour the 'earthy/rocky' area was using the colour picker, and it was also blue. The shade of blue was slightly different, it was blue-violet. You can see in the little box in the middle, it looks to be lilac. I looked all over not a trace of brown or green to be found.

My initial instinct was to paint this type of scene with neutralized green and red/brown paint or perhaps some purple, but that would be wrong. At the beginning of the blog, in the painting margins I tested out the idea that blue can in fact look like different colours if it was painted with some desaturation which I created with dilute carbon black, and hints of magenta or phthalo to tip the hue. Indeed, the colours I made looked quite different, but the colour picker analysis showed that they were all very similar shades of blue.

 So what is going on? I read over Handprint.com (MacEvoy) and he said that the visual system is capable of 'removing tints' to figure an object's true colour. For example if you walk into a room illuminated with green coloured light bulb, and the walls are a pale shade of green, your visual system will conclude that the walls are probably white. But if you walk into a room with a white light, where the walls are physically painted green, the visual system figures out that the walls are actually green. In the case of atmospheric blues, like in the mountain, the visual system effectively removes the blue tint and concludes that the pine trees are dark green and the rocks are a purplish brown. Look back at the photo! Those hills have green pine trees and brownish rocks.

Could there be another factor? When playing with the colour picker, I noticed that desaturated (greyed) versions of blue actually have a different appearance. Below, a closer look at blue violet: 

If you look at the left box, towards the top right , it is a purplish blue, whereas in the middle it has a distinct magenta (pinkish appearance). Here is a crop out, so you can compare the saturated to the desaturated: 

And the other shade of 'true blue' here is the saturated compared to desaturated:

 

The top is like sky blue, the square below looks like a dark turquoise, but they are actually the same hue. 

The take home message is that when blue becomes desaturated (more grey) it starts to look like a different colour even though the hue has not shifted. So in the mountain scene, the best choice for painting would be to use a true blue like cobalt (PB28) or phthalo sapphire (PB15:0) with a touch of diluted carbon black (PBk6), while the rocky area is blue violet probably isoindo blue (PB60) and a touch of magenta (PR122/PV19) with dilute carbon black. It sounds totally wrong, but I will have to try it next time I see rolling mountains in the distance. Another hiking trip to mount Sutton perhaps?

 And what about the green? Surely the beautiful rolling hills of Yosemite have abundant shades of green. Here is a colour pick on one of the shrubs in the foreground: 

The 'bright green' shrub... actually dark yellow, not even close to being green. after a bit of searching the pixels, I finally did find a tree that was chartreuse green. It is hard to believe my eyes, but almost the entirety of this scene is only 3 colours, blue (all the mountains), yellow (the shrubs), and orange (the rocks and brown appearing shrubs). 

Geraniums, Catholic Church

 

It is not very often that I paint religious buildings, but this scene was poignant. A brilliant geranium in a chartreuse flowerpot caught my eye, I had brought pyrolle vermilion (PR255) on my palette and it would make the perfect colour. Then I noticed the teddy bear and toddlers shoes lined up along the staircase and realized that this was a memorial (or message) regarding more than 200 indigenous children's remains found at a residential school in Kamloops British Columbia recently. The grand entrance to the Catholic church was built to be welcoming, but seeing the stark evidence of the tragedy that unfolded not that long ago was impactful, and passerby's were stopping to look. In the background is Loyola Campus and the building where my office is located, topped by the greenhouse. Choosing to paint this scene may have been political, but in the end I painted what I saw. Now I will go back to my policy of not painting pictures that feature religious buildings, a decision I made many years ago.

Geraniums, Catholic Church, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, June 2021 (No. 2684)

Greenery Highlights

 

One concept that is important to my landscape paintings is to capture the interplay between nature and the urban environment. To paint this scene I stood adjacent to the community garden boxes which provided the rich earthy foreground element, with a good view of a cedar tree and more trees in the background. The parked SUV was central to the view, and it was reflecting gold and green highlights from the sky and foliage. The composition actually includes two perspectives, one is looking almost straight down at the garden elements, the other is looking up and to the right at the houses and shrubberies in the background. The front grille of the car looked like an angry gargoyle.

A few colour notes, I used the same cedar bark mix as discovered in the recent de la Savane painting,  for the greens I used benzi yellow (PY154) instead of the lemon version, and for that rich loamy earth in the foreground I used raw umber (PBr7) with carbon black (PBk6) and touches of perylene maroon (PR179).

Urban Jungle, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, June 2021 (No. 2680)

Walking down Fielding, the sun penetrated the overcast post-rain sky creating an intense highlight on a yellow-ochre brick house. I knew it would go away, sure enough by the time I got my gear ready to paint the scene was back to being drab and grey. From memory I crated the intense colours, and luckily the sun came out again and I could finish the painting. It is my favorite colour scheme, grey green brown blue. Another colour note, I brought some pyrrole vermilion (PR255) on the palette, it is an intense scarlet red, you see splashes of it on the top left buildings.

Ochre Highlight on Fielding Av, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, June 2021 (No. 2681)