No Math Required: Using Color Perspective to Add Depth to Your Paintings
Carolyn Lord’s (Ep. 21) watercolor palette is by no means limited. In fact, the artist has been working with more or less the same colors (just under 20 give or take) for decades. She’s chosen them carefully for their individual pigment characteristics. Each of which comes in handy when playing with a powerful perspective tool: Color perspective.
Perspective is how artists place objects in a three dimensional space on a two dimensional picture plain. The idea of perspective brings images of straight edges, vanishing focal points and geometry and yes, that can be part of it (that’s called linear perspective).
But there’s a no math approach too: It’s called color perspective. Color perspective is using pigment color and texture qualities to create a sense of depth in your painting.
Perspective isn’t only for landscape or photorealist artists. It’s for any painter wanting to create a sense of depth in their work. And for Carolyn Lord, whether she’s painting the California coast or her garden flowers, she’s using color perspective to make her work stronger.
What are Pigment Qualities
Understanding color perspective means we need to understand pigment quality. When Carolyn Lord squeezes out a color of paint on her palette, it comes with innate properties. These same properties come into play when working with color perspective.
Let’s take a quick look:
Color temperature: How warm or cool a temperature leans. Ie a warm blue vs a cool blue
Color transparency: How easy it is to see through your color. Ie transparent to semi transparent to opaque.
Color granulation: How much pigment sediment is apparent when using a color. Some pigments have a bunch and some have none.
Color Saturation: How bright a color is. Colors range or can be adjusted to either be highly saturated to highly neutralized (greyed down.)
Color perspective is using pigment color and texture qualities to give your viewers a sense of depth in your painting. There are several ways to do this using (1) temperature, (2) transparency, (3) granulation, and (3) saturation.
FOUR WAYS TO USE COLOR PERSPECTIVE IN YOUR PAINTINGS
Now that we understand pigment quality, let’s take a look at four ways to use color perspective below.:
Color Temperature: Warm and Cool Colors
Color perspective tells us that warm colors come forward and cool colors recede.
But what is warmer, red or yellow? From a color perspective standpoint, Lord says that yellows sit in front of reds. Reds in front of blues.
Those mountains at the very back of your painting? If you’re looking to create a realistic sense of depth, those mountains should be the bluest of the mountain forms in your piece. Have a forest full of trees? Make the trees farther in the distance be bluer than the ones in the foreground.
Similarly with flowers, Carolyn Lord will take a poppy painting and make sure that her poppies closest to the viewer are the warmest poppies but by the time she’s painting the poppies farther back, she’s cooled them just slighted.
Color Transparency: Transparent and Opaque Colors
With color perspective opaque colors come forward while transparent colors recede.
In Lord’s work she will use a transparent yellow like burnt sienna for a background yellow flower shape but use an opaque color like cadmium yellow for a foreground shape.
For a forest painting, mix transparent greens for the background trees and more opaque greens for the foreground trees.
This doesn’t have to be a sweeping landscape to put into practice. Say you have a bowl of lemons. Even with the tight focus, you can help the viewer by making the lemons in the back of the bowl just a bit more transparent than the lemons in the front of the bowl.
The human eye can detect the most subtle of shifts. Use that to your advantage if you want to create a sense of depth in your paintings.
Color Granulation: Granulating and Non Granulating Colors
Color perspective says that granulating colors come forward while non granulating colors recede.
This is where surface quality comes into play. Surface quality is art speak for does the paint create any sort of texture. Granulating colors do create a sense of texture and so therefore they create surface quality.
Let’s look at an example of granulating pigments in a landscape watercolor painting.
In Carolyn Lord’s Painting “Tuesday at the Headlands”, she creates a large granulating wash on the surface of the cliff but then reaches for less aggressively granulating pigments for feather back in the distance.
Color Saturation: Saturated and Neutralized colors
With color perspective, saturated colors come forward while neutralized colors recede.
A fourth way to use color perspective in your paintings is playing with the saturation levels of your colors within the painting.
In Carolyn Lord’s painting “Sunshine Dahlias”, she makes her foreground dahlias(and especially her area of interest dahlias) the brightest orange. She neutralizes her flowers as she moves further back in the painting.
In our landscape example, make your foreground trees brighter than your background trees. In your still life, make those foreground lemons just slightly brighter (or a whole lot brighter) than your background lemons.
WHO NEEDS TO LEARN COLOR PERSPECTIVE
Color perspective is another tool in your artistic kit. If you’re looking for a way to create depth in your work (even if just a little), it’s a great one to play with.
Bonus, no rulers necessary. Just something you already love…your paint.
Learn more about color perspective and how to use it in your work by listening to Ep. 21 with Carolyn Lord.
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