Here's another recycled post from three years ago.
Take away the fashions of the era. Subtract out the staging and posed stiffness of his portraits and turn your attention to the vibrancy of color
alone. There you will find a mastery that makes today's painters drool over works by John Singer Sargent.
Prowling through hundreds of Sargent paintings, we discover one thing most of them have in common--the juxtaposition of cool and warm. Let's close in one of
those.
Look at this color analysis:
Notice as your eye moves side to side across the fabric, each vertical stroke of color is slightly warmer or cooler than the stroke beside it. When we analyze the
actual color in those strokes, we discover they are slight variations of a neutral version of orange and red orange, ranging in values from halftone to shadow.
- You'll need cadmium red light, ultramarine blue and white.
- Now, using combinations of just these three, mix all the colors you see in the analysis above.
- Begin by adding cadmium red light to ultramarine blue until it becomes as neutral as you can make it. This will be very dark. To find the colors, use white to vary the values and add tiny bits of cadmium red orange into these for slight variations in warm and cool.
- Now, use these color mixtures to do a study of the photo below, alternating warm and cool like Sargent does in the fabric we just studied.
Doing this exercise, you will have unlocked one of Sargent's most often used methods of making color sing. You will have discovered for yourself
one of Sargent's color secrets.
Doing this exercise, you will have unlocked one of Sargent's most often used methods of making color sing. You will have discovered for yourself
one of Sargent's color secrets.
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