Color Harmony for Artists

How to Transform Inspiration into Beautiful Watercolor Palettes and Paintings

Ana Victoria Calderón

• Publisher: Quarry Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781631597725
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Techniques

Explore and create expressive palettes and paintings with Color Harmony for Artists. Watercolor author, artist, and teacher Ana Victoria Calderon guides you through choosing, mixing, and using color with watercolor and mixed media to create the most expressive and appealing combinations and effects for a wide range of moods and subjects. You'll explore a variety of subjects and themes, including flowers, foliage, landscapes, skies, cities, figures, art movements, and historical eras.

• Begin with a quick overview of the basics of color, color mixing, and mixed media.
• Explore a variety of color and media combinations, including brilliant brights, muted neutrals, high-contrast complements, and special effects.
• Find inspiration in evocative photos, abundant palettes, and beautiful paintings.

With Color Harmony for Artists, every artist, from beginner to advanced, will be inspired to embrace the creative possibilities of color and paint!

Inspired Palettes

Austere De Stijl

When studying art history in college, De Stijl always stood out for me because it was so distinctive. De Stijl, which translates to “The Style,” was a Dutch art and architecture movement founded in 1917. Also known as Neoplasticism, the approach has many strict rules, including using only vertical and horizontal lines and rectangular shapes in black, white, gray, and primary colors (red, blue, and yellow).

For this palette’s primaries, use your purest pigments. For instance, a neutral blue like cobalt or royal blue is a better fit than an indigo or navy (both of which lean toward violet) or a turquoise (which tends toward green).

For the texture swatch, I decided to create my own De Stijl composition.

TECHNIQUE NOTES Swatching this movement is challenging because of its many restrictions. Although I limited myself to black and the three primaries, I followed watercolor’s lead and swatched those colors in different values by modifying the amount of water in each swatch to create some visual variation. Note that this is the only palette in the book where the colors aren’t mixed together.

Shimmering Impressionism

Nineteenth-century Impressionism, originally centered in Paris, is famous for a specific style of brushstroke that is repetitive, relatively small, and uses lighter tones of paint to allude to the effects of reflected light.

The movement’s name comes from Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, painted in 1892, when an art critic in France published a satirical review of the style. Hence the name “Impressionism.” Another inspiring painting is Monet’s Vétheuil in Summer, 1880. In this scene from the Seine River, the shimmering effect of repetitive brushstrokes on water demonstrates the importance Monet placed on representing light accurately.

In honor of this movement, I experimented with mixing color by laying out numerous short brushstrokes. The direction and value of each stroke is incredibly important to create enough contrast.

COLOR NOTES This palette is soft, romantic, and slightly muted. The painting mainly depicts a cool vibe with light greens and blues as accents and details of lovely peachy tones. To create the perfect peach, water down an orange mix or add a touch of white gouache to give it a creamy appearance.

Swirling Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau arose when European art was heavily academic. The movement drew inspiration from such styles as two-dimensional Japanese woodblock prints, Rococo curves, and Celtic motifs. Organic yet structured, applications of this style moved beyond the canvas and fine art to poster art, stained glass, architecture, metal art, jewelry, ceramics, textiles, and wallpapers, to name a few. It’s an important ancestor to what we know as graphic design. The movement also paved the way for Art Deco and Modernism.

I’m pretty sure this is my favorite movement, specifically pieces by artists like Gustav Klimt and Alphonse Mucha. Our reference design is Mucha’s The Arts: Poetry, 1898.

The color palette is muted and soft, and an exemplary use of split-complementary color harmony. Orange tones make perfect contrast with the various blue and green shades, plus a touch of neutrals. I used complementaries in the color mixing process, adding a touch of blue to the orange mix to dull the bright and sunny feel and gain a...