Colour study in gouache from Ivon Hitchens painting, see Group Chat for details.
Colour study in gouache from Ivon Hitchens painting, see Group Chat for details.
Louise Balaam - Monthly Landscape Painting
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Yes, I wonder if he mixed colours beforehand or as he went along. I read that he prepared a thumbnail sketch initially and then did an underpainting of lines and shapes to get the basic design. Then he would paint freely, knowing the direction he wanted to go.
This is a fascinating account of your colour research. I am wondering how much time Ivon Hitchens spent mixing colours as when we see him painting plein air with all his equipment carried on his bike, he doesn’t seem to have lots of paint tubes or tins. Just lots of brushes which it seems he stored in water until he got around to a big cleanup.
Thanks Mike, great to see the colour study and your very helpful comments – I haven’t come across the virtual paint mixer before, I’ll look it up! Glad the exercise helped make you’re aware of the subtleties of the colour – and I think making the colour areas abstract shapes rather than following the painting too closely makes the viewer more aware of the differences between the colours. You’re right about gouache changing colour as it dries, always useful to do some colour swatches. I hadn’t realised the distinction between acrylic and traditional gouache, that’s very interesting
Hi Elizabeth
I pu the comment as a reply to Louise’s comment at the top of Group chat. I’ll copy it here too. Thanks for your interest.
I tried a colour study of a landscape scene by Ivon Hitchens (Boathouse, early morning 1956), as Louise describes in her April video and I posted it in the course Gallery. I used a colour print of the painting from an old catalogue but have not shown it in the Gallery as I’m not sure about copyright infringement.
I used ‘traditional gouache’ colours (Schminke Horodam), as I wanted to be able to reactivate dried paint with water (‘acrylic gouache’ doesn’t do this once it dries). It seems that ‘designer gouache’ is made with more fugitive pigments, rather than lightfast ones, so is less stable in UV light – this won’t matter much in a sketchbook but might be relevant if it’s used for display.
I first prepared a colour swatch of each colour I had as when dry they tend to be darker and it’s useful the see the change. Then I compared the colour swatch with the colours in Hitchens’ work and prepared mixes as appropriate. Every colour needed some modification. The darks were the most difficult, some contained blue, others green and others red. I found the exercise made me look more closely at the colours in the painting and appreciate their subtleties and harmonies.
When it’s tricky to achieve a good colour mix the use of a virtual colour mixer can help e.g. ‘Golden virtual paint mixer’. You can create a virtual palette based on the colours you are using, upload an image of the painting and approximate the colours needed for the best mix.
This is interesting Mike but couldn’t see anything in group chat?