John Lovett: Controlling Color

John Lovett shares his tips for finding the right color balance in every painting.

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There is often a temptation to be led blindly by the subject we are painting when it comes to decisions regarding color. A much more effective approach is to extract only what we need from the subject then carefully consider how best to tie these selected colors to the rest of the painting. Two useful tools to aid our color decisions are the use of complementaries and balancing saturated color with compound colors.

Saturated Colors

Saturated colors contain either one or two primary colors and no black or white. They are the purest colors of each hue. For our purpose, we use a 12-part color wheel containing three primaries (red, yellow and blue), three secondaries (orange, green and violet) and six tertiaries that sit between the primaries and secondaries.