Hazel Soan - Learn Colour in Painting Quickly

Connections (detail)

Oil on canvas 122 x 76cm/48 x 30in

Learn Colour
in Painting
Quickly

Hazel Soan

To family, friends and fellow travellers you have filled my life with colour.

My thanks as ever to Cathy Gosling and Tina Persaud and my publishers Pavilion. Especially to my editor Nicola Newman and designers Tokiko Morishima and Rosamund Saunders.

Colour is a quintessential aspect of the art of painting and my aim is to unravel the mysteries of colour and pigment in ways that will help you choose, use and mix colours effectively. Some people have a natural colour sense, knowing instinctively which colours to put together in a painting, but for those who dont, rest assured, this is a skill that can be learned. Colour obeys both scientific and artistic rules, and paint is a physical substance, so how it behaves can be explained, grasped and put into action. Naturally I write from a personal perspective, so this book includes the colours I use in my watercolours, oils and acrylics. Welcome to this colourful and exciting journey!

Fearless

Watercolour 76 x 56cm/30 x 22in

Understanding how colour works gave me the confidence to paint this elephant in strong, bright hues.

Song of the Street

Watercolour 25 x 35.5cm/10 x 14in

Colour is awe-inspiring. The more I find out about it the more I am filled with a sense of wonder ... and I am still learning.

Without light there is no colour. Light is electromagnetic radiation, measured in wavelengths, which are visible to the human eye between infrared and ultraviolet. Different wavelengths look like different colours to us as seen in the rainbow and when mixed together appear as white light. As light strikes an object, some of its wavelengths are absorbed and some are reflected. The wavelengths that are reflected are the colours we see.

The spectrum of visual colours

When white light is split by a prism we can see the six colours of light that are visible to the human eye: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet.

Red is the colour shown by the longer wavelengths (infrared are longer, but we cannot see them). Blue is the colour exhibited by the shorter wavelengths (ultraviolet wavelengths are shorter still).

Corniglia

Watercolour 25 x 28cm (10 x 11in)

These houses have no colour until light shines on them and is reflected back into our eyes.

When we see an object such as a red rose, it is not the case that the rose is red; it has absorbed all the wavelengths of light except for red. The reflected light bounces back to the eye, hits the light-receptive cells in the retina, the optic nerve whizzes the signal to the visual cortex, and the information is processed by the brain as the colour red.

So you can see that the colours of objects are not actual colours, but the result of reflected light and a response/judgement call made in the brain reacting to a sensation in the eye. Colour is neither absolute nor finite; it is a variable dependent on light.

Tivoli Roses

Watercolour 28 x 38cm/11 x 15in

The colours of these roses are determined by the wavelengths of reflected light. Under a light other than white they would show as different colours.

Light zooms across the Universe, but we can only see it when it strikes matter. Matter acts as a mirror for the light, absorbing it and reflecting it. Without matter we cannot see the light, and without light we cannot see the matter. Each needs the other to be made visible the perfect cosmic balance.

Artists paint is made from pigments, the colours of which mix differently from those of light because they are received differently. Colours of light are emitted and add together to make white light hence this is called additive mixing. The colours of material pigment, on the other hand, are reflected colours. When these are combined the mix becomes increasingly dark as wavelengths of light are subtracted by absorption and fewer are reflected back. Pigment mixing is thus referred to as subtractive mixing and eventually reaches black, when all the light is absorbed.

Additive mixing

Red, green and blue are the primary colours of light; they mix together to make white light. Magenta, cyan and yellow are the secondary colours.

Subtractive mixing

Red, yellow and blue are the primary colours of pigment. They mix together to make black since all the wavelengths of light have been absorbed. Orange, green and violet are the secondary colours.

White

When we see white, the object is reflecting all the colours of light. When we see black, it means almost all the colours of light are being absorbed.