Good artists are organised artists.
Yup. Contrary to common belief a successful artist is someone who has control of their studio space, have their colours well organised and keep to a neat working schedule. Why? Well, being an artist is embracing the chaos that comes with having your creative brain turned on CONSTANTLY, always open for new ideas, always ready to act on a new brilliant thought. And to be able to act on any of those genius paths you better have your physical space together. Personal experience. (Or is that just my ADHD speaking?)
So. Organise your colours! The most visibly noticeable aspect of colour is its value. So one good way of arranging your paints is to group them by intensity, by their value. If you can organise your colours as either being clearly dark or light value, it will be easier for you to swap a colour for an other but still give a coherent impression. It’s a trick I use a lot in my portrait art!
(For example; a red colour is interchangeable with a purple colour of the same value but not with a more saturated red as that would change the value of the red.)
An easy way to see if this is working is to view your art from a distance. Take a few steps back and squint! What you see through your half closed eyes is what will pop in the painting.
An other good way to check if your values are on track is to snap an image of your art and make it black and white. Straight away you’ll see if the values are off or working purposefully to your advantage.
I can also recommend to start off your painting somewhat subdued and then add saturation as you progress. Value is noticed before “color” by the human eye, so a viewer will see high value contrast areas in your art before anything else. So when creating your art, if everything is fully saturated nothing will pop..It will just be screaming at you from all directions and you won’t know where to place your eyes. If you, on the other hand keep your colours in a light value in the beginning you still will have room to expand to more saturated colours as your work evolves. Once the work becomes more developed you can better guide the viewer to the interesting parts by adding saturation where you want the spectator to look.
If you’d like to read more about colours and how to use them I’ve made a free guide you can download here.
And if not, keep reading about how opposites attract here.
Or even better, go spend some money on my website.
That’s all for now! Until next time, get your shit together. Joking! Just keep painting my loves and you’ll be fine 🫶