Mastering Color Unity is Easier Than You Think
When you look at a painting by acrylic artist Jed Dorsey (Ep. 27), you'll notice that all the colors in the painting seamlessly work together. There is a sense of harmony throughout the whole piece.
But how does he do this?
Is it years of experience or his masterful design skills?
Surprisingly, it's neither.
The secret lies in something so simple that you can start implementing it today and achieve similar color unity results.
Dorsey limits his palette.
He uses only three primary colors along with white and black for all his paintings. By mixing these five pigments, he creates all the secondary and tertiary colors he needs. This approach almost guarantees unified color even before he applies his first brushstroke.
Put it to Practice:
If you're struggling with color harmony, the solution is remarkably straightforward—limit your palette.
Choose one red, one yellow, one blue plus white and black and try working through paintings with just those five pigments. (If you’re painting in watercolor, skip the white and black.)
It may take some practice to get comfortable with color mixing, but you'll notice a significant improvement in the cohesiveness of your paintings.
Plus, by focusing on these limited colors, your overall ability to mix and understand color will improve rapidly.
Commit to using this 5-pigment palette for a few weeks. Take the time to truly understand how these three primaries interact to create secondary and tertiary colors.
You may be tempted to add a new color if and when you run into color challenges. But hold fast. The solution is probably just that you need more time to learn color mixing and the addition of a new color will actually slow you down.
Once you feel confident and have a good grasp of color interactions, you can gradually introduce one new color at a time. Learn how to integrate it with your existing palette, and slowly build up to a more complex array of colors.
However, like Dorsey and many other artists, you may discover that those three primaries plus white and black provide everything you need from a color perspective.
So much of learning how to use color is complex. Color harmony isn’t actually one of them. Limit your palette and you'll have 80-90% of the work done already.