Why Your Color Problem Isn’t About the Paint
When a painting’s color feels off, your instinct might be to bring in more paint.
Maybe a brighter color. Maybe something richer. After all, can’t the right color in the right spot fix anything?
But Betty Franks Krause (Ep.10) encourages students to hold off. Because that might actually make the problem worse, especially if the issue is color harmony.
When your painting lacks harmony, it can feel busy. Or like parts of it don’t fit with the whole. Sometimes something just feels off.
Harmony is something Krause is constantly thinking about. And she has three big ways she ensures her paintings stay bright while also staying harmonious.
First, she creates a mother color.
Instead of pulling five colors straight from the jar and putting them onto the canvas, she mixes a little of each color together first. This is called a mother color, and yes, it sometimes makes a muddy pile.
But instead of using that color as is, she takes a tiny bit of that “mud” and mixes it back into each color she plans to use.
Now suddenly every color contains a hint of the others.
The result is a palette that naturally works well together because the colors are related.
Second, she doesn’t obsessively clean her brush between every color change.
That little bit of leftover paint subtly mixes the previous color into the next color, creating unity across the whole surface.
And when warm meets cool on the brush and creates a neutral?
She’s fine with it.
Because those neutrals not only help harmonize the painting as a whole, they also help the brighter colors sparkle.
Third, she uses a limited palette and mixes her colors.
Franks Krause doesn’t use an extremely limited palette, but she isn’t constantly bringing in new colors either. She has found a set she absolutely loves, and she mixes everything else she needs.
Every time she mixes two colors, or three, she increases her chances of creating harmony.
Put It to Practice:
Color harmony can feel overwhelming at first. But it’s less about having a vast amount of color theory knowledge and more about setting up a process that makes harmony possible from the start.
If your paintings aren’t feeling harmonious, try this.
For your next painting, choose the colors you’re going to use before you begin. Try to limit it to six at most. The fewer colors you start with, the easier harmony becomes.
Keep those colors as primaries, red, yellow, and blue, and mix all of your secondary colors.
If you need green, mix blue and yellow to get it.
If you need orange, mix red and yellow.
If you need purple, mix blue and red.
At first this will feel awkward. It might even feel silly. After all, why not just reach for the purple already on your palette?
Because it likely won’t be harmonious.
When you mix your secondary colors, you’re integrating your palette. The more you do it, the more natural it becomes. And the more harmonious your work will feel.