Kelsey's and Anoosha's Art-Book Videos

Kelsey Rodriguez's YouTube channel has made her a hero for self-taught artists, so I was pleased that she included my book Color and Light among her recommendations in her video on YouTube

Kelsey Rodriguez: ART BOOKS to read instead of going to art school!

Also, Anoosha Syed did a recommended art book video which includes a review of Color and Light.

Thanks, Kelsey and Anoosha!

The hub of the color wheel

Joshua asks on YouTube: "You said in part 1 of Color Wheel Masking, "... As each of these colors approaches the center, it becomes a neutral gray." Why neutral gray, what is the reasoning or significance for this? I see in some wheels, the use of (outer to inner circles) white, black and saturation centers as well as neutral gray. Same question regarding a center white or black, if you please?"

A color circle created using CMYK Sliders (Source)

Answer: You could use white or black instead of gray at the center of a color wheel, and many people do, especially when they're in the digital realm. Whichever you choose, the center of the wheel should have zero hue saturation. Black, white, and gray all fit that description.

It helps to keep in mind that the color wheel doesn't represent the full color space, which is a three-dimensional volume, where the vertical axis is a gray scale. The Munsell color system charts color three dimensionally, like a tree with a trunk that goes from black at the bottom to white at the top, as the vertical arrays of hues branch out from the central trunk. Note that the colors have peak saturation at different values. Yellow peaks in lighter values and blue peaks at darker values.

So the color wheel is a horizontal cross section of that 3D color volume, sliced through the peak saturations of each hue, with a gray at the center.

Most color wheels don't have a constant value all around the perimeter. I chose to represent the hues at whatever value shows them at peak chroma, and then I put the center point at an average gray value rather than raising it up to white or dropping it to black.

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More on color in my book: Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter

Sandrine's Color and Light Review

Thanks to Sandrine for her review (Link to YouTube) of Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Artist.
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The book is available signed from my webstore or from Amazon.

Relative Color Temperature

Anand has some questions about how people talk about color temperature.

He says he understands how a yellow can be cooler if it leans more toward blue, and warmer if it has a red bias. But which blue is warmer/ cooler? One could argue that a blue with a red or violet bias is warmer because red is a warm color. But a blue with a yellow or green bias can also be regarded as warmer because yellow is also a warm color.

He also asks which is warmer, green or magenta? And is there a pure primary color on the dividing line between warm and cool? Finally, Which is the warmest color on color wheel of tube colors yellow or orange?"

Casein paint

Answer: Artists mean different things when they talk of color as warm or cool. A swatch of orange or blue standing alone can be described in absolute terms as a warm color or a cool color. Alternately, some artists use color temperature more as a relative concept to distinguish two closely related colors. For example, a green mixed with more orange might be regarded as warmer than a similar green that was composed with more of a blue-green hue. 

As you suggest, this relative approach to assigning color temperature can be confusing when someone is talking about blue, which could be made warmer with the addition of either red or yellow. I would agree with you that blue is the coolest color, so I don't think it makes any sense to describe a warmer blue.

Is there a primary color on the dividing line between warm and cool? Yes, greens and violets are on the dividing line, but artists don't always agree precisely where to divide the color wheel. Color theory historian David Briggs explains further how the color wheel has been divided between warm and cool through history.  

Which color is the warmest? I'd say a yellow orange, like a cadmium yellow medium is the warmest. But this is also a matter of debate. Keep in mind that warmth is not something you can measure with a thermometer. It's psychological. And the effect of a color in a given painting depends to a great extent on what colors you put around it.

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More about this in my book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter (James Gurney Art)

Color and Light in Russian and Korean

Here's my contribution to international diplomacy: the new Russian and Korean editions of Color and Light: A Guide for Realist Painters.

Why Limit Your Palette?

The new issue of International Artist magazine (#106, December/January) has a four-page feature that I wrote on extreme limited palettes—palettes that have four or fewer colors plus white.

One rhetorical question I pose is: Why limit your palette?

1. Paintings from limited palettes are automatically harmonious, but they’re very often eye-catching and memorable too. 

2. Old masters used limited palettes by default because they just couldn’t get the range of pigments we have now. Using older, quieter colors can give a much wanted mellowness. 

3. A limited palette forces you out of color-mixing habits. If you don’t have that standard “grass green” color, you’ll have to mix it from scratch, and you’re more likely to get the right green that way. 

4. Limited palettes are compact, portable, and sufficient for almost any subject. In fact you can paint almost anything in nature with just four or five colors.

In case you missed it, here's a recent video showing a painting made with just two colors plus white (Link to YouTube video):

International Artist magazine has been successfully using the cross-media strategy of printing QR codes next to paintings for which there is an accompanying YouTube video.

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Previously on GJ: Limited Palettes 

Grayed CMY Experiment

The Zorn Palette 

Water Tower with a Limited Palette

Gamut Masking Method

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"Gouache in the Wild"
• HD MP4 Download at Gumroad $14.95
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Strategies for Evoking Moonlight

"Khasra by Moonlight" is one of the original paintings in the exhibition "The Art of James Gurney"  in Philadelphia. 

Khasra by Moonlight by James Gurney, 12 x 18 inches, oil on board

To evoke the feeling of moonlight, I used the following six strategies, which I based on my own personal memories of observing moonlight, and my study of other artists whose nocturnes I really admire (especially Frederic Remington, Atkinson Grimshaw, John Stobart, and Frank Tenney Johnson):

1. Set up an overall temperature contrast between the orange torchlight and the cool blue-green moonlight.

2. Keep the chroma in the moonlight low--not too intense of a blue-green. Hint of blue in far distance.

3. Put a slight warm halo around the moon and edge-light the adjacent clouds.

4. Keep the key of the painting relatively high.

5. Suppress all detail in the shadows and put some texture and variety in the lights.

6. Introduce a gradual stepping back of value, lightening as it goes back to the far minaret.

Here's the quick (45 minute) maquette that I built for lighting reference. It didn't need to be beautiful at all, just any old blobs of modeling clay were all I needed.



I quickly discovered that I had to move the actual lighting position quite far to the left, much farther to the left than the position of the moon in the painting.

After taking a digital photo of the maquette, in Photoshop I shifted the key toward blue-green, and I desaturated it slightly. The photo shows a lot of reflected light in the shadows, which I largely ignored. I would have played up that reflected light had I wanted to evoke daylight effects, where I might want to amplify the relatively weak reflected light.

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Resources

"The Art of James Gurney" at the Richard Hess Museum at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia will be on view through November 16, and I will do a public presentation on October 29.

"Khasra by Moonlight" was first published in Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara

There's a discussion of architectural maquettes in my print book Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist and an exploration of moonlight in Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter

GurneyJourney YouTube channel
My Public Facebook page
GurneyJourney on Pinterest
JamesGurney Art on Instagram
@GurneyJourney on Twitter

Limited Palette Tests

I just finished writing an article called "Extreme Limited Palettes" for International Artist magazine and I want to preview one small part of it for you.

The article will include these four color charts. Each diamond-shaped diagram represents the possibilities of three colors, plus white.

Each diamond shape is composed of two isosceles triangles. The left triangle represents the gouache colors straight out of the tube, and the right one represents the mirror image of those colors, but mixed with white. Secondary mixtures appear as rectangles along the side of each triangle. The darkest "black" you can get from those colors is the small dark patch in the center of the left triangle.


Each chart gives a sense of the full available gamut for that limited palette, so you can see at a glance what's possible with a given set of colors. For example, you can see how this painting belongs with the chart in the upper right, the one with yellow ochre (Holbein), perylene maroon (Winsor Newton), and viridian lake (Winsor Newton)—plus white (M. Graham).

Below is another way to set up the charts using hexagons to represent the color wheel, with tints in the center. These are done with oil.



The colors you choose for your limited palette don’t have to be blue, red, and yellow, or even cyan, magenta, and yellow. As long as they’re differentiated, the painting will seem to have a full universe of colors.

Before you start a given painting, you can refer to a set of charts like these to decide which limited palette would suit the subject you want to paint. These charts would be a big help if you're thinking of joining in with the Graveyard Painting Challenge for October.
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More about limited palettes in my book, Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter
Previously on GJ:
Limited Palettes
Experiments with an Ultra-Limited Palette (Catskill Roadhouse) with video

Video Review of 'Color and Light'

Jason Morgan just produced this video review of Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter. (Link to YouTube) The book is available on Amazon.

Thanks, Jason. Check out Jason's website on his excellent wildlife art, photos, and videos.

"Color and Light" in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean

We just received copies of the new Chinese hardback edition of "Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter" (upper left) from the Eurasian Publishing Group / Solutions Publishing (link to publisher's web page).

There's also a Chinese softcover edition and a Japanese and Korean edition.
The little dinosaur on the cover is Mei long, from China's Liaoning province.

Translating "Color and Light" into Japanese

Last summer, Japanese publisher Born Digital ordered the fifth reprint of Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter. 

I am always fascinated by the way ideas about the visual world vary from culture to culture. Given that Western and Japanese traditions are so different, I wondered what was involved in translating the ideas in my book for Japanese readers. 

The translator of Color and Light, Sanae Hiraya, very generously offered to answer some questions.

1. What concepts in Color and Light were the most difficult to translate?

"Is Moonlight Blue?" was the most difficult topic to translate.

This topic explains a new and sensational fact. It is easily expected that this topic will draw readers' attention. We paid extra attention to this scientific topic on both readability and accuracy.

2. In Japan, do Western color names such as "red, blue, yellow, violet, and green" correspond to similar hues there?
In the Japanese education system, art education employs western style theory and method. So we have Japanese color names correspond to key color names such as red, blue, yellow, violet, and green.

However, in the old days, there were only four color names in Japanese.
They are red (AKA), black (KURO), blue (AO) and white (SHIRO).
Green was included in the range of blue.

3. Are Japanese children raised to recognize the same set of primary colors as American kids?
Yes. Children are taught the Munsell color system in elementary school along with the concept of primary and secondary colors.

4. Are there Japanese concepts of color and light that are completely foreign to most U.S. artists?
Traditionally, Japanese paint/draw subjects with lines (not with planes). It was 1876 that we started learning western style of art execution/theory. Until then, Japanese painters did not use light and shadow in their paintings nor express 3D forms in their artwork.

Let's see the example, a series of drawings called "Animal-person Caricatures," which are stored in the Kosanji-temple, drawn during 1053 to 1140 by an unknown painter (probably several monks). These drawings are still popular in Japan.

In the case of portraits, you can see a typical traditional Japanese style in the Hyakunin Isshu cards. On those cards are drawings of the poets and their poems. All of the poets are of high rank, including monks, emperors, princesses and so on. This kind of plainness was typical in the Japanese traditional painting style. There is no expression of light and shadow.

As for the color, Japanese regard violet as most noble color because of the cap system established in 603 (Cap system itself no longer exists). Please refer to Wikipedia on details.

5. In Japan or Asia in general, are there different cultural reactions or emotional reactions to soft edges or the illusion of depth?


I don't think there are different reactions to those effects. However, there is a classical style of painting called SUIBOKU-GA. SUI=water, BOKU=ink and GA=painting.

The painters of SUIBOKU-GA type of paintings intentionally utilize large negative spaces, strange subject placement, soft edges and so on. As we are used to seeing such techniques as a part of paintings, Japanese accept paintings depicting real objects or scenery that are far from reality.

6. Are there any feelings associated with the color green? (Here in the USA it is often conceptually associated with the environmental movement or the color of money, and painters have often debated the so-called "green problem," where high-chroma green colors in landscape paintings are often said to have a repellant effect on the viewer). 
Most of the feelings associated with green are positive: for example, nature, relaxation, peace of mind, new birth, youthfulness, safety, friendly to eye and so on. In elementary school, children are encouraged to look at greens (leaves, grasses) to rest their tired eyes between classes.

As old Japanese did not distinguish green (MIDORI) from blue (AO), there are many expressions that mix up these terms. For example, we say "blue mountain," "blue leaves," "blue woods," "blue chili," and so on. We Japanese ourselves sometimes feel these expressions strange.

In terms of art, Japanese artists usually start learning art from how to paint/draw Ka-Cho-Fu-Getsu. Literally, Ka=flower, Cho=birds, Fu=wind, Getsu=moon but Ka-Cho-Fu-Getsu means the distilled aspects of nature enjoyed by artists including poets (it does not mean the wilderness as is). Japanese people love to use the color green in paintings as we believe it relaxes our mind.

Painting by Kazuo Oga, background painter for Studio Ghibli

7. Are lightness and darkness, or light and shade regarded differently in Japan?

There isn't much difference, other than the fact that we sometimes do not care about light and shade. 

There was one thing I noticed during translation. Translating "dark + COLOR NAME" into Japanese is simple. As with the English expression, saying "dark + COLOR NAME" worked. However, in the case of "light + COLOR NAME," most of them were converted into the specific color name.

For example: dark red vs. light red. The expression "dark red" is acceptable. However, in the case of light red, we feel some unnaturalness and feel better to use the specific color name such as "pink," "salmon," "cherry blossom color," "peach color," and so on if appropriate. I don't know the exact reason why I felt that, but this is one thing we need to care about in translating the Color and Light book.

Thank you, Sanae Hiraya, for taking the time and effort to answer these questions,  and I'm grateful to you and the people at Born Digital for introducing my book to Japan.

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Japanese edition of Color and Light at Born Digital's website

English edition on Amazon: Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter

Signed copies (US Only) at my website

Reflected light in shadow

This oil painting by Charles Courtney Curran (1861-1942) shows the Water Gate at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893.

Here is a good example of the color of shadows, something that cameras can't capture as well as the human eye.

The sources of light in shadow are very distinct: blue sky, orange ground, and white architecture, and there are white planes facing in all directions.

The direct sunlight is coming from behind and to the right, making the illuminated surfaces a bright white.

There are two main sources of light in the shadow: warm light bouncing up from the ground, and blue skylight from above.

At letter (A), left, the upfacing shadow planes on the roof are receiving mostly blue sky light.

(B) and (C) are down-facing planes. The light is mostly warm-colored bounced light from the ground.

The far side of the arch (D) is getting very strong reflected illumination from the brightly lit opposite side of the arch, as well as apparently some greenish light from the water in the canal (not visible in this view) passing beneath the gate. 

At (E), the columns are a little bit lighter than other parallel vertical surfaces. They're projecting outward, receiving quite a lot of light from all directions, both warm and cool. 

It's possible that the columns appear bit lighter because they're a slightly lighter local color. According to an old description, the facades were made of "staff," a mixture of plaster, jute fibers, and horsehair, painted in cream and gold.

The "White City" was torn down less than a year after it was built. 

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The topic of light in shadow is covered in my book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter, which U.S. customers can purchase signed from our web store.
Color and Light is also available from Amazon. It's the ultimate gift for the artist in your life.

The Curran painting is a recent acquisition of Godel Fine Art. Godel will be represented at The American Art Fair, November 16th – 19th at the Bohemian National Hall, 321 East 73rd Street, New York. There's another scan of the image at Skinner Auction, where it sold recently.

American Masters Show at the Salmagundi Club

I'm pleased to announce that four of my landscape paintings will be exhibited and offered for sale at the American Masters show from October 14 - 24 at the Salmagundi Club in New York.

I'll be honored to be sharing the walls with artists like John Stobart, Burt Silverman, Christopher Blossom, Dean Mitchell, and Scott Christensen.

Winter Sunset

oil on canvas mounted to birch panel, 11 x 14 in.
Framed Dimensions: 18 x 21 in.
Publication history:
Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney, Andrews McMeel, 2010, p. 183.
American Artist magazine, Gurney cover feature, November 2006, p. 39.
International Artist magazine #80, August/September 2011

Exhibition history:

“Dinotopia: Art, Science, and Imagination,” Lyman Allyn Art Museum, September 22, 2012 – February 2, 2013 

Creek Above Kaaterskill Falls

oil on linen, 20 x 16 in.
Framed Dimensions: 23 x 27 in.
Publication history:
Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney, Andrews McMeel, 2010, p. 2.
Plein Air magazine, April 2005, p. 54.
American Artist magazine, Gurney cover feature, November 2006, p. 38.

Falls at Devil’s Kitchen

oil on canvas mounted to birch panel, 12 x 16 in.
Framed Dimensions: 21.5 x 25.5 in.
Publication history:
American Artist magazine, Gurney cover feature, November 2006, p. 39.

Kaaterskill Falls

oil on linen, 20 x 16 in.
Framed Dimensions: 23 x 27 in.
Publication history:
Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney, Andrews McMeel, 2010, p. 179.
The Conservationist magazine, December, 2004, p. 19.
American Artist magazine, Gurney cover feature, November 2006, p. 37.
International Artist magazine #79, June/July 2011.

Exhibition history:
“Dinotopia: Art, Science, and Imagination,” Lyman Allyn Art Museum, September 22, 2012 – February 2, 2013 

For art students, this will be a not-to-be-missed exhibition. For collectors, this is a rare chance outside of auctions to acquire my paintings, as I don't sell very many originals, and these are important ones from Color and Light.

Jeanette and I will be attending the opening event on October 17.

When do you paint highlights?

A couple of years ago I visited the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University as the guest of the illustration department. After giving a lecture, I did a portrait demo of painting professor Tom Barrett. 

As you can see, there were at least three sources of light (two incandescent floods on stands and the window light, but the one next to the table predominated. The drawing is in water-soluble colored pencil and watercolor about 8 x 6 inches.

Once I had established the preliminary drawing, one of the earliest decisions was where to place the highlights, since I was using transparent watercolor only. So when I laid the first washes of skin tone across the face, I painted around the white spaces on the forehead, the tip and bridge of the nose, and the cheeks.

In watercolor, since highlights are the lightest values, they must be left as unpainted white paper. They can also be masked out from the start, or applied with gouache at the last. In oil paintings, highlights should generally be saved for the last. 

There's a lot more on the subject of "highlights and specularity" in the six-page article that I wrote for the current issue of International Artist magazine, which should be on the newsstands now.

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Flickr stream with more photos of my visit to AIB
Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University
International Artist magazine, Issue 90
Photo above by Keith MacLelland

Media: watercolor pencils and water-soluble pastels. Water and ink applied with water brushes, one filled with water, and the other filled with fountain pen ink. 

This subject is also covered in my book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter (Amazon), also available signed from my website store.

Highlights and Specularity, Part 1

This photograph shows three spheres with varying surfaces. The one on the left is matte, the one in the middle is glossy, and the one on the right is highly reflective. 

On the matte sphere there is no highlight. On the glossy sphere in the middle, the highlight is clearly apparent. The mirror-like sphere on the right also has a highlight, which is really a reflection of the light source. The light source is the sun shining through a window.

The right sphere also reflects the scene around the ball, including the white paper background and the dark room behind the camera. In the right ball, you can even see a reflection of the middle ball, with a highlight in the middle of that reflection.

That same pattern of reflections of the paper, room, and neighboring ball is subtly visible in the middle ball as well.

In the middle ball, there is a second, smaller highlight just to the right of the primary highlight. This secondary highlight is the sunlight is reflected three times. The light bounces off the middle ball, bounces back off the right ball, and bounces again off that little highlight on middle ball back to your eye.

So we've arrived at a definition: A highlight is a specular reflection (Latin "speculum"=mirror) of the light source on a shiny surface. The shinier and smoother the surface, the brighter and clearer the highlight.

These three diagrams show what's happening at the surface level. On the matte surface, light arrives from the top left and hits the rough surface. Some light gets absorbed and the rest scatters away in all directions. This is what happens when light hits a matte surface like a sand dune or a sweater.

The glossy surface of the middle ball bounces a a portion of the light at the same relative angle as the incoming light, but some of the light rays hit uneven spots and bounce in random directions. This is like bouncing a golf ball on a country road. It will probably bounce the way you want it to unless the golf ball hits a crack or a pebble.

The mirror-like surface is so smooth that all the light bounces off the surface predictably at the same relative angle, like bouncing a ball off a basketball court. (Edit: a true mirror-like reflection requires a metallic surface, and cannot be achieved by smoothness alone. Thanks, David!)

Since highlights belong to the world of specular reflection, they should be thought of as somewhat separate and distinct from the normal modeling factors (light, halftone, and shadow) of diffuse reflection. Artists in the world of 3D computer graphics can control the form-modeling and the specularity as separate components.

I wrote an article on this subject of "highlights and specularity" for the current issue of International Artist magazine, which should be on the newsstands now. This blog post is just a little piece of it.

The six-page article contains a lot more examples and explanation, and it includes artwork that has never been reproduced in print before. I'll talk more on the blog about highlights in real-world examples tomorrow.
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International Artist magazine, Issue 90
This subject is also covered in my book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter (Amazon), also available signed from my website store.