First I need to say that none of this is hard fact, and every rule can be broken in art. These are simply some guidelines that may help you improve, especially if you’re interested in pursuing realism like me. So without further ado, let’s get started. It’s a long one!:
Ahh, good ol’ grey. I love you. You have been so good to my paintings lately now that I’m starting to understand you more. This post is about using grey to your advantage, and how it can make colors more vivid, instead of less.
“The greys make the picture.” It sounds odd, doesn’t it? If you’re using color, why would you want to dull it?! But I’ve have seen this mentioned countless times by countless artists, and I’ve tried it myself by doing grey washes over color to unify my palette. IT IS SO USEFUL. “Try greying all but two colors, or mixing a single color into all but one or two of the others."
By Adolf Hiremy-Hirschl, The Souls of Acheron
That blue dress really stands out, doesn’t it? It is probably the most vivid shade in the entire thing. it helps that less saturated hues are framing it. If your subject matter is very important, I would try to make it colorful, and add greys to everything surrounding it. "Brightness is relative. A color will be brighter against a greyed color than it will against a bright one.”
A few other quotes relating to this:
“Most wide expanses of color should be toned down with complement or grey, to give other color a chance. The larger area, the softer the color is a good axiom.” (Again, this is key for creating focal points through color. If the majority of your painting is toned down with grey, those bits of stronger color are going to pop. A painting with intense color throughout can easily lose focus.)
“We therefore can associate a bright area with a grey or muted color, or else complementary color to obtain and hold brilliancy."
"You may be sure that one primary plus its neighbors, and opposed by its complement, will never go dead. These, supported by greyed colors, with black and white introduced, will always be brilliant."
By John William Waterhouse, Circe offering the cup to Ulysse
The majority of this painting is greyed. One of the strongest colors in this piece is Circe’s lips. Even the blue of the sky is rather de-saturated, it is just lighter on the value scale. (I won’t touch on values yet, since I hope to do a separate post for them.)
Now I have to stress that this doesn’t mean that you should sap the life from every hue. No, no, no! It’s just that color can be deceiving when viewed inside a painting as a whole. Like this:
By Frank Dicksee, The Two Crowns
To me this piece looks very colorful, and it IS (and has probably been adjusted to be) but one of the most striking colors in it is on the king’s cape…
And this is where it sits on the color picker. As far as I can tell, barely any of the other hues cross that line. They seem to stick closer to the bottom, to the left, or somewhere in the middle. I’ve noticed this a formula for many older paintings. They favor softer colors!
By Anders Zorn, Self-Portrait
This one is the definition of a greyed painting. I’ve noticed that much of Zorn’s art has been altered in photoshop to make it appear brilliant. This was a man who was said to have used a very limited palette! This happens to tons of older paintings for whatever reason (if you’re really curious, just take a look at “The Two Crowns” painting from above in this google image search. If I had to guess, the original was probably closer to this.) but to me these variations just kill the overall subtly of the color schemes the artists originally used.
Anyway. Like I said at the beginning, none of these are strict rules to be followed. Pigment is beautiful and if you love using all sorts of colors, DO SO. Personally though, since I’ve always been a huge fan of grey palettes with color accents, I tend to agree with the masters on this. Grey is an immensely powerful tool. If I had to compare, a lot of greyed paintings are similar to the hues of an overcast day. Color in nature and in life is usually never as intense as we perceive it to be.
But I also think that in the end, if your values are right, you can use any color. Values are arguably one of the most important things you’ll ever learn as an artist! Get those right, and you can get away with anything. (I still struggle with values myself!)
Even so, you can’t get the values right without using grey. (。^_・)ノ
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