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Author: Johannes_Vloothuis, Contributing Editor
| Fig 58. The blue door is practically the only place where this color appears. This creates the focal point in the center of interest. |  |
| Recommendations: I won’t go into color harmony deeply because that takes a whole book to cover. If you intend to take art seriously, it will be extremely helpful to read up on this and apply it to your work. I personally prefer to intermix colors with their complements instead of black. The more colors you mix together the muddier they will get. This will happen after three colors are intermixed and will worsen as more colors are added to the pool. Vary the color slightly every 2 inches to avoid monotony. Most people prefer paintings with predominant warm colors rather than cool ones. Only one hue and temperature should predominate in your painting. Reserve the strongest chroma for the center of interest and add a touch of its complement to make the surrounding color stand out more. Do not repeat the same color that appears in the background in the foreground. This will give the feeling there is a hole in the painting. Place warm colors against cool colors (also complements)because they enhance each other. (See fig . 61) Cool colors recede warm colors bring things closer. Leave your blues or violets for the background. Use this concept to create depth. One way to help balance your painting and make it harmonious is by repeating the same hues in all areas. (See fig. 57) For those who do know about color harmony, I can offer this piece of advice as a trick to create a bull’s effect in your center of interest. If you add small touches of color that are out of your color scheme it will strongly draw the viewer’s attention to that area. |
 | Fig. 59. The color harmony is off in this painting. Don’t you feel that the mountains belong to another picture? The blue-violet color only appears in the mountains and not repeated anywhere else. |
| Fig. 60. In order to intertwine the colors, the artist was wise to bring the blue from the sky into the puddles. Observe the amount of variegation of ochres and greens in the tree highlights. |  |
| Recommendations: If your painting is predominantly green, a bluish green sky is better than a blue one. Here are a few gimmicks to bring down the sky colors onto the bottom portion of your painting: Bounce these colors on the shadow sides of rocks and tree trunks When leaves in the shadow portion of a tree are at a 90 degree angle to the sky they will reflect the sky colors due to their shiny polished looking surface which act like mirrors. Some discrete hard to detect with the naked eye touches of green in the shadows of clouds will further ensure color harmony. Bounce colors that result from direct sunlight hitting an object into its surrounding objects. It is uncommon to apply white paint straight from the tube. This would be a cool white and unpleasant too look at. Add a touch of orange or yellow to warm it up. That’s the reason why manufactures of watercolor paper add an orange pigment to their product so the areas left blank will be warm whites even though no pigment has been applied. |
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