A Common Challenge for Beginning Painters and the Power of Color Triads

There are many challenges involved in learning to paint.  Mixing colors and applying the paint are basic skills to be mastered.  However, as I look back on my career and observe the beginning painters that attend a monthly workshop I host at a local library, there is an even more fundamental problem that we all face.  It can be summarized as fine art representational painting is not the same as wall papering or house painting!

Let me explain.  Most of us grow up with certain stereotypes built into our way of thinking and seeing our world.  For example, the grass is green, the sky is blue, trees are green, tree trunks are brown, and water is blue.  With these built in rules, as beginners we struggle to mix a green color for the grass and a blue color for the sky.  We then tend to apply the same green to cover the whole grass area, and used the same blue to paint in the whole sky!  This type of color application works well for house painting and wall papering, but not for the type of fine art painting that we are trying to master.


Let me illustrate with one of my own paintings that I did early in my painting career.  

Notice the grass is a pretty uniform green, the sheep is light grey and the sheep house is a darker grey.  Years later I set about to improve this painting.  Note the sheep are now many shades and tones of a grey brown.  The grass is many types of greens, yellows, reds and browns. The old sheep house has many colors of the worn wood, with reflections of the warm evening light and the blue of the sky!  Quite a change!

Learning that there are virtually no flat areas of color in nature and how to realize this in my painting has been perhaps the greats single learning experience of my art career!  I came to fully appreciate this based on three experiances:


1. The study of 750 of Monet's paintings, which I will discuss below.


2. Learning the painting technique for painting skin tones that Scott Nickerson taught me in his portrait class.  This is a method for applying broken colors of paint into a surface covered with clear medium.  It gives the skin a transparent and vibrant appearance, as depicted in my painting below.

I will discuss this painting technique in another post, and eventually in the My Painting Methodology section of the website.


3.  The color pool painting technique that I describe in the Painting Methodology Section is a perfect process to obtain the harmonious color variations that are required.  My method is based on using a Triad of colors as the starting point for constructing my color pool.  I will describe this in more detail below and eventually in the My Painting Methodology section of the website.


Monet's Gift to Us


Monet's gift to me is the realization is that there is no flat area of color.  This became apparent to me as I studied 750 of his paintings.  I have picked out three to illustrate to the point. 


First, consider his snow scene pictured below.  It is white snow under a gray sky.  But notice there is no area of either a uniform white for the snow or gray for the sky.


The sky is a vibrant mottling of blues, grays and purples of different values and tones.  The snow on the ground is also a beautiful patterning of whites, grays and violets.  Note also that the walls and buildings are a darker value of the same colors found in the sky and ground.  A beautiful color harmony is achieved.

Now consider the painting of the railroad station shown below.  The concrete floor of the station is anything but a uniform gray concrete color.  It is a gray indeed, but it varies from point to point: sometimes a gray with more yellow, sometimes a gray with more blue, sometimes a gray with more red, sometimes darker or lighter!  These colors match those found throughout the painting in the smoke and buildings.  Again magnificent color harmony!

Next consider Monet's landscape shown below.  This is  a perfect example to show that neither the sky or the water is a flat blue!  Zoom in and look at any area of the sky and you will find that it is a combination of many small patches of related colors.  Look at any small area of the water ant you will see the same thing, where the individual patches of color match the patches that you can find in the sky or the trees and other objects on the land.  Again, since different values of the same colors appear all over the painting, a fantastic sense of color harmony is achieved.

Another good example is a painting by my teacher Scott Nickerson, shown below.

Notice that this little statue is mounted on a concrete church wall.  However, the wall is not represented by  a flat gray concrete color that our built in rules would tell us!  The wall is indeed a gray color, where the gray can be achieved by mixing blue, red and yellow.  However, each adjacent patch of wall is represented by a slightly different combination of the three colors.  This yields a beautiful color harmony and a vibrating realness to the wall!


Two other example can be seen in my Rumson Sea Bright Bridge painting shown below.

Consider the beach area in the lower left of the painting which is shown in detail below.

The color of this beach area is created by mixing a yellow, red, and blue triad of colors, along with white.  The interesting variation in the tones on the beach are all obtained by just varying the proportions of the three colors:  more yellow in the sunny areas, more blue in the shadow areas that are open to get the sky reflection, and more red in the areas of deeper shadow.  Also note the variation in the colors of the water, which mirror the colors of the sky, discussed below.


Similarly, the detail of the sky area shows the interesting variation in the sky obtained from the blue, magenta, and yellow triad of colors along with white.  Again, these variations are so much more realistic and interesting than a flat blue painted sky!

In each case the color variations are obtained by varying the proportions of the paint mixtures of three colors.  The three colors that define the triad form a color pool or gamut in color space.  These spaces contain all of the possible colors that can be mixed from these three colors and will form a triangle in color space, as described below.

Color Pools


First let me review what i mean by a color pool, as introduced in the My Painting Methodology Section of the website.  A color pool can be defined as a color gamut, or area, on the color wheel as depicted below.

Remember every color has its position on the color wheel defined by its hue, for example is it a red or an orange or some sort of reddish orange, and by its chroma or intensity.  A high chroma color is very bright and intense and falls toward the outer edge of the color wheel.  Whereas a dull or low chroma color will fall near the center of the wheel, with a neutral black or gray found at the center of the wheel.  This is described in detain in the Color Mixing section of the My Painting Methodology section of the website.


In the chart shown above, the seven colors of my Modern Color Pallet are shown at their respective location on the color wheel.  


I have connected the outer colors with straight lines to define my color pool or gamut.  Any color that falls within this space on the color wheel can be mixed using the colors of my Modern Color Pallet. The fact that these tend to be bright high chroma colors is very useful, since it enables you to mix a wide variety of colors.  Bright colors such as these can always mix duller colors such as earth tones, but dull colors can never mix to form the brighter colors.

Remember, when we mix any two colors, the resulting color will fall somewhere on the straight line that connects these two colors in color space.

Color Tiads are the Secret to Achieving Success

The use of color pools is discussed in the Color Mixing section of the My Painting Methodology section of my website.  A color triad is a specific type of color pool as pictured and described below.

The color pool of the triad is defined by the triangular shape on the color wheel.  The color triad is defined by the three colors which define the points of the triangle.  In this case it is a color pool defined by my orange yellow, orange red, and violet blue pallet colors.  Any color that falls within the boundary of the triangle can be mixed using these three pallet colors.  In this case a tremendous  variety of earth tones, reds, oranges, greens, red, violets, grays, and blues can be mixed from just these three colors.


I will add to this post in the future many examples of the type of color mixing that can be achieved with color triads.  But for now, let me emphasize that the types of related color patches observed in the above paintings can be achieved simply by slightly changing the ratios of the three colors used to define the color point within the triad color pool. This is very simple to do and I will be providing a number of examples in the future.


This simple principle of avoiding flat planes of color by slightly varying the proportions of the the colors in the color pool has been the single most significant benefit to me for improving my paintings and my appreciation of the art of the masters!  I hope you will find it beneficial also!

Examples of Color Triad Paintings


Manky Mallard Example

My painting "Manky Mallard" is example of a painting using a three color triad.

The color triad used is pictured below.

Every color in the painting was mixed from some combination of Phthalo Blue Green Shade, Quinacridone Magenta, and Hansa Yellow light, with an appropriate amount of white to help set the value.

The pallet that was used to paint this painting is shown below.

The various grays were mixed as follows.  As you can see above, an orange was mixed from the yellow and red.  Then as you go down below the orange on the pallet more and more blue was added to the orange miture.  When white is added to these mixtures you can see a sequence of grays, frist a red gray moving down to a blue gray and even a black as more blue is added to the orange. 

Hello Example

The following painting, "Hello" is another example that used a different color Triad.

The color Triad used for this painting is shown below.

In this painting all of the colors, with one minor exception, are a mixture of Hansa Yellow Medium, Napthol Red Light, and Anthraquione Blue, with an appropriate amount of white.  The one exception is that in order to get the deep cool red of the fall leaves in the background some Quinacridone Magenta was added to the mix.


Again, the minor variations that you seen, for example in the fur of the sheep, are easily achieved by slight variations in the mixture within the color triad.


Using a color triad guarantees that you will achieve color harmony in your painting, since since all of the colors are created from the same three base colors.  Choosing a color triad is based on where you see the image you are to represent in color space.  Consider the two previous examples.


The duck on the pond was a scene of cooler colors.  Hence, the color triad used includes the cooler yellow and red, and excludes the warmer upper right hand portion of the color space.  See the chart of the v/y-v/r-g/b Triad above.


On the other hand the sheep painting was depicting the warm evening sunshine.  Therefore the Triand used, o/y-o/r-v/b, includes the warmer part of the color space as you can see in the chart above.  The violet/blue color was included in the triad in that it mirrors the warm blue of the late afternoon sky.

Just in case your are tempted to say that the two previous paintings are quite simple and of course you only need three colors to paint them I am including the following.


This is my recreation of Greome's Bashi Bazuk, done in Scott Nickerson's Master Class at Colorest in Red Bank, New Jersey.

Notice in the painting and the detail of the head that the colors are subdued but of tremendous variety.  However, 98 percent of this painting was accomplished using the high chroma colors of Hansa Yellow Medium, Napthol Red Light and Phthalo Green Blue Shade, pictured as the top three colors in the image below.  The only other color used, except white, was a minor amount of the Quinacridone Magenta, pictured at the bottom of the image below.

As I mentioned previously, bright high chroma colors can always mix dull neutrals, but not the other way around.  This painting was a perfect example of this capability.


My painting "Swan Lake" involved an interesting triad of colors , which I will describe in a future update.

These are just some of the considerations in choosing and using your color triads.  More to come!  Stay tuned!