Experimenting with new colors

Experimenting with new colors

Burnt carmine, Permanent Violet Medium, Olive Green.      (Rembrandt Oils.)

Burnt Carmine   The best way to describe Burnt Carmine is it’s a “smoky” version of Alizarin Crimson.  

The carmine tells you it is part of the red family.  It’s much cooler than Cadmium Red, but warmer than Alizarin.  It is a beautiful addition to toning down the intensity of color in cool greens and blues.  It can also warm up browns and blacks without making them too much hotter.   It’s beautiful in shifting your warm greens and reds around.  Burnt Carmine can also help bring a color forward without having it turn too hot or orange.  I have been throwing it in many of my colors, just to see the result.  I love it and have been using it quite often.

Permanent Violet Medium.  This is a violet balanced on the red side of violet.  

This is another one of those colors that is excellent in altering some colors without turning them toward brown.  It is a great addition to shift your blues slightly toward a blue violet.  It can also downplay the intensity of your greens.  Try this color in your brown hues, or with the addition of black you can accomplish some beautiful grays.  Adding a very small amount of this to white creates a wonderful warm white when you don’t want it too hot.

Olive Green:  A very transparent green warmer than sap.

I received this color completely by accident, when the store I ordered it from accidently packed the wrong color in my order.  I decided to give it a try and found I really liked it.  It is a warm, yet very transparent and color, so its not one I use a lot, but it does have some properties that I really like.  It has the ability to push a color, rather than be a color.  By that I mean you would not choose to use this color by itself (or at least I wouldn’t) but it has beautiful warmth about it to move colors around.  Reds can move toward a rustier tone, it can transport your greens to something new and more vibrant.  It can push your blues to a warm and dirty aquamarine.  As I mentioned, it is used only on the occasions you want to warm a color with new and exciting results, as opposed to adding a yellow hue, you might experiment with this color.

Exploring with new colors is a great way to break away from old habits of color mixtures.  It will add freshness to your paintings.   It can create little shifts of color that help move the eye around without distracting the viewer, but instead engaging them to look more.  

Have fun and explore more.