How to Choose Colours for Painting

To watch the painting lesson for Between Rock and Sky, click here.

Personalize Your Colours

How to choose colours for painting? Choose colours you like! Simple right? Whatever colours you use, make some decisions before beginning. Will your painting be bright or dull, warm or cool, low key or high key? This painting, for instance, is painted brighter than the reference photo. Also, it is mid-key and is warm in temperature.

How to Choose Colours

Repeat! Decide first if your painting will be bright/dull, warm/cool, low key/high key (dark/light).
Choose a limited or more complex palette of colours. However, if you are a new painter, use fewer colours. Keep it simple.
Decide on the mood such as: happy, sultry, melancholy, energetic, calm…
Use colour schemes. For example, this painting uses two complementary pairs. I chose permanent green light/quinacridone magenta and dioxazine violet/nickel azo yellow. Additionally, I used phthalo green, which is a discord to magenta. Discords are ‘almost complementaries’. Discords make more colourful combinations than complements.
Note that using complements and discords ensure colour harmony.
Use a colour wheel. A colour wheel helps you to visualize the results.
Experiment with colour combos. Test the colours in your sketchbook.
Especially important is to place colour mixtures on whatever colour ground you plan to use. The appearance of hues are influenced by their surrounding hues.

Colour mixing is complex. The simpler your palette, the easier it is to learn. Having said that, experiment away! My sketchbook looks like a mad artist was let loose, yet I have a learned a lot. In particular, I have discovered many colour combinations which I love. This process has also taught me how to choose colours for painting.

Use an Organized Palette

Painting is hard enough. Keeping an orderly palette is a must. It can get messy, but know where your paint colours are. This will help keep you in the ‘flow’. As on a piano key board, my colours each have their own place.

Sta-wet palette — The palette for ‘Between Rock and Sky’

Viewpoint and Design

Besides choosing colours, choosing a viewpoint is an important consideration. For Between Rock and Sky, I chose a low vantage point looking upwards. The design is based primarily on a frame-within-a-frame design.