Beyond the blue and orange.

Colour is important to me. When it sings the painting is going well, the marks look terrific and I’m feeling good. So if my painting is going to be about colour then I need to get better at it. I want colour to pop out at you from my canvas, so to get that feeling I have been working on making sure that the colour I put down is as different as possible from the one next to it. To do this I have been relying on complementary colours from the colour wheel. A blue is as different from an orange as possible, so how can I go wrong? The trouble I’m finding is that I have become a little trapped by my complementary colour combinations. I get stuck after I’ve put yellow next to purple and I’m not sure where to go next.

I decided to give my cherished complementary combinations a rest and look at colour in a more general way. I would make my next colour as different as possible in terms of value, saturation and temperature and see if that could break me out of the corner that I’d painted myself in.

The result was my most successful colour painting so far:

When this red turned up I wanted to make the painting about that. Instead of going for green, again, I ignored the fact that it was red and called it a ‘hot saturated dark’. The colour next to it had to be a ‘cool desaturated light.’ The pale blue next to the red makes me very happy. I like the simplicity of the design too - use a large brush!