How to Blend Tones in Oil Paint
Blending tones in oil painting is an important skill. Value, hue and intensity are the three variables that determine the pigment of any oil color. Value is the luminance or brightness of a color. Hue is the color tone. Intensity is the saturation of that color. All paint colors fall into the "color wheel." The primary colors, red, blue and yellow, can be mixed to create secondary colors, green, purple and orange. White adds luminance to the colors. Black reduces luminance. Learn a few blending tricks and create the color you want.
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Things You'll Need
- Wooden palette
- Palette knife
- Cadmium yellow oil paint
- Ultramarine blue oil paint
- Cadmium red oil paint
- Yellow ochre oil paint
- Alizarin crimson oil paint
- Titanium white oil paint
- Ivory black oil paint
Instructions
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Primary colors Open your turpentine or solvent and pour it into your glass jar. Fill the jar 1/2 full of the liquid. Place your brushes in the jar. Put your paper towel, palette knife and paint tubes in front of you.
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Palette knife Use your palette knife to put dabs of the yellow, blue, and red oil colors on the palette. Wipe off the knife with paper towel after grabbing each color. Put the colors in a row, 2 inches from one another. Then put a dab each of white and black at the end of the row.
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Blue and yellow pigments Grab some yellow pigment with a clean palette knife. Place it below your row of colors. Grab some blue pigment. Place it next to the yellow sample. Blend the two colors together. You now have green.
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Red pigment Grab some more blue pigment. Place it next to your mixed green color. Grab some red pigment. Blend the two colors with your palette knife. You have purple.
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Clean off your palette knife with paper towel. Grab some more yellow pigment. Place it next to the purple. Grab some red pigment. Blend the yellow and the red. The result is orange.
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Look at your color wheel. Find the color opposite yellow. The opposite color is purple. Grab some yellow pigment and blend it with a small amount of your purple color. The result is a less intense yellow color. Blending two opposite colors reduces the intensity of each color. Add some more purple. The mixture is more neutral. Add some white. You have a tinted gray color.
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Combine a dab of red with some green. Red and green are opposites on the color wheel. The result is a neutral brownish pigment. Vary the mixture and create different intensities and ranges of brown.
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Color blends Place a dab of black in your mixing area. Use a brush and sweep some of the color on to your canvas board. Select some alizarin crimson. Select some ultramarine blue. Blend the two colors together. You have a black tone. Use a clean brush and brush some of the mixture next to the ivory black. Your mixture is deeper and more complex than the tube pigment.
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Caucasian skin tone Mix together cadmium red with some cadmium yellow. Add a tiny amount of ultramarine blue. Add white. You have created a Caucasian flesh tone. Use yellow ochre for darker skin tones instead of cadmium yellow.
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Tips & Warnings
Yellow ochre, Naples yellow and raw sienna are literally "earth colors"; the pigment is dug up from the ground. These paints were used by Renaissance artists.
Modern paints derived from minerals, such as cobalt blue and cadmium yellow, have more intense color levels.
Paint in a well ventilated room or outdoors.
References
Resources
- Photo Credit Primary Secondary & Tertiary Colour Wheel image by Sophia Winters from Fotolia.com Palette with oil paints image by petercoupe from Fotolia.com red image by Pefkos from Fotolia.com An image with palette with oil paints image by Mykola Velychko from Fotolia.com gold silver and red paint image by Andrew Brown from Fotolia.com rainbow circle image by jonnysek from Fotolia.com portrait 3 image by Gaelle Levrey from Fotolia.com
