Simplify with a Color Scheme

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. I chose this painting for my Sunday email because I wanted to talk about color schemes and how to use them in your paintings. A color wheel is really an important tool for an artist and, on the backside, it explains different color schemes such as complimentary, split complimentary, analogous, triad, and monochromatic. These are useful because if you use one of them the colors in your painting will work well together.

For this painting, I chose a complimentary color scheme where you use colors that are opposite on the color wheel, in this case red and green. I did not limit myself to one red and one green instead, I used all the different reds on my palette and mixed several different greens. Using only one red and one green would be very dramatic but it would not have the subtleties I was after. You can see I painted some leaves with a cool green mixed with olive and cerulean blue and then used olive alone for a warmer green. The dark background is a combination of olive green and ultramarine blue with perylene green added here and there.

For the red flowers, I used rose dore, cadmium red, alizarin crimson, and Indian red. It is up to the artist if they want to include other colors as long as they are only used as accents. You can see I used red-orange for the small flowers at the top and this was a logical choice because red- orange is next to red on the color wheel. I also included gray which is not really a color but a neutral and gray is used to show off other colors in a painting. This is a plein air painting that I did in Denver Botanic Gardens and using a complimentary color scheme gave me a plan and parameters to work within. Painting on location in a place lie Botanic Gardens can be overwhelming and using a color scheme is one way to simplify the experience. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton