I paint typically with a limited palette…of French Ultramarine Blue, Cadmium Lemon Yellow, Bright Red….and white. Sometimes Naples Yellow…sometimes viridian.

Important for me to have a good rich and dark blue as it will be my darkest dark…(I use Utrecht French Ult Blue)…

I mix pure blue, a bit of red..touch of yellow to keep too violet. A bit more yellow if I want a lean toward green…
just depends what it juxtaposes.

Not hard…just a touch one way or the other with the red or yellow to keep the dark warm or cool, one sense of color or another….

Here are some examples of darks I got with these three paintings, all painting from life…

something where the hue [u]is[/u] evident in masstone (which isn’t black any more).

Einion

it feels dark enough to read black, yet has a hint of color to push further contrast…this is actually a very good painting stragegy.

As an example- if one has a red with lighter value as an adjacent color to the dark…by having the dark you have contrast, but by having the dark (which reads at the first look as a black) a slight hint of green, you get an additional whammy (if-you-will) from a complementary to the red. I don’t like the hint of green I get adding a green to black…but I do very much love the richness of the dark I make leaning to a green.

I tweak my darks all the time to get that effect.

Other than when I’m playing with a Zorn palette using a black…with my regular limited palette…I don’t like mixing color into black to tweak the black.

I did do just that for nearly 17 years with acrylics…but now, after having made my own pigment that feels black and causing it to lean toward a color I want for additional contrast for the past 12 years or so, it is my testimony and opinion that there is a notable difference. A liveliness or richness. Mixing up what looks and feels like a black leaning toward a color does look different than taking black and adding a color to it. Something about black tends to kill a lot of color.

Thing is…there is much that can be said for learning to make one’s darks, just making oneself all the more capable and knowledgable. Confident.

After the past 12 years mixing my own forms of black, I now finally am feeling confident enough to play with palettes….like Zorn’s…but took quite some time to get to a place to regain trust in myself. Black became too easy to use…but just as easy to miss better judgments.

Each his own…like black, not like black.

Take the roll of 35mm film I painted above. The dark doesn’t look like a black(?)…doesn’t immediately strike the eye to read as such? Look carefully, and note all the color in the closeup of that 35mm film canister in effort to compose that dark. Most artists using black to paint such would just paint the dark black…which would then just appear black…and thus flatter, less life.

At very close inspection…see how the hints of color in making the suggestion of black/dark work to pull off the greater excitement…greater illusion of depth I wanted-

Not disavowing opinions, but I’ll have to agree to disagree…and many outdoor painters past and present would agree with me on this one. Many that mix their own darks…mix up their own sense of black…

Most painters in the past used black pigment if they wanted black.

Not most Impressionists…not most painters on location…and reading John F. Carlson on Landscape Painting, Edgar Payne, Emile Gruppe on and on would also show many opinions advising to stay away from the use of it.

That being said…I’m certainly not saying there are not traditions, periods of masterful fine art (Renaissance and Baroque for one) and so on that did not use black, nor use it well. Sargent used it wonderfully. I don’t believe most modern/living artists work I’ve seen demonstrates using black well. Not like Sargent did.

I am arguing however that it is a completely legitimate interest and supportive history for those artists interested in learning to paint without black. There are advantages to learning to suggest black or darks, richer livelier color for one.

it [i]feels[/i] dark enough to read black, yet has a hint of color to push further contrast…this is actually a very good painting stragegy.

Granted, a very dark grey surrounded by lighter colour looks darker.

The important point in relation to the original question though: once you get light enough to see evident hue – regardless of how that colour is achieved – we’re not talking about black any more; this is not as pedantic as it might seem. Important to make the distinction IMO – black is black, ‘rich darks’ are what they are, dark near-neutrals are different again.

I’m reminded of the “how do I paint a black dog so it looks black?” type of question. Well as you know you don’t paint the whole thing black (or even close really) but if you get the values right, with good blacks or near-blacks placed appropriately, then the dog’s coat looks right – looks black – regardless of whether it is in fact mostly not black

Thing is…there is much that can be said for learning to make one’s darks, just making oneself all the more capable and knowledgable. Confident.

Ah yes, definitely a good point. Knowledge is power when it comes to how to use one’s palette.

But as a corollary: a lot to be said for not dismissing/ignoring that the same kind of results can be achieved starting with a black paint… and sometimes there are better colours available* by this route.

Not most Impressionists…not most painters on location…and reading John F. Carlson on Landscape Painting, Edgar Payne, Emile Gruppe on and on would also show many opinions advising to stay away from the use of it.

They’re all wrong

I still think that discarding black essentially is a ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ kind of thing. And if a black paint (which aren’t all the same anyway of course) isn’t quite right often the simplest method is to spice it up by mixing something else with it, instead of starting from scratch.

Tweaking a dark as you say, but just doing it a different way.

Especially if one has the right other paints available (i.e. not using a limited palette, which is, as the name suggests, limited) these black + another paint mixtures can be gorgeous, not at all the type of “dead”, “killed” colour that we too often read.

Einion

*Comparisons of enriched blacks with mixed near-neutrals to try for anyone interested (I’d suggest using a carbon black here):
black + Quinacridone Rose v. Quin Rose + Phthalo Green YS
black + Pyrrole Red v. Pyrrole Red + Viridian (or Phthalo Green BS)
black + Phthalo Blue GS v. Phthalo Blue GS + Venetian Red
black + Dioxazine Purple v. Dioxazine Purple + Chromium Oxide Green
black + French Ultramarine v. French Ultramarine + Burnt Sienna

Brush each mix out thinly to see the chroma in undercolour + mix it with white to see the tint.

I think I’m beginning to get it. I’ve always thought of black as an absolute, but a lot of people seem to think of it as another color similar to blue, red, yellow, etc. For example, just as there are green-blue, purple-blue, dark blue, light blue; there must also be green-black, red-black, blue-black, dark black, light black (hmmmm… :confused: ), etc. It almost seems to make sense, even though it doesn’t really.

Richard

Mindset. Black is simply another colour many people treat differently than others. Due to convention, perhaps? The vast majority of the time I’ll mix a tube black with other colours to shift it this way or that. Other times I’ll use it as a very dark blue.

White is commonly seen with subtle tints of other colours. What reason is there to treat black differently?

Everyone has such interesting ideas on Black paint. To use Black or not to use Black…

I like Ivory Black(or WB’s Black Roman Earth) myself, sometimes I will add blue to it to make it move back in space. Black is a type of blue, a very dark one. I always have it on my palette, you can’t mix a good neutral without it in my opinion.

Art history is filled with painters who used it: Frans Hals, Velásquez and Rembrandt come to mind as do Turner, Constable, Inness, Zorn, Manet and Sargent to name a few who had black on there palettes and used it to great effect.

I am an advocate of simplicity, it’s cheaper to use black out of a tube than to mix it from expensive colors such as Cadmiums which at $30 a tube for a good brand is a lot higher than the $6 to $10 for the same size tube of Ivory Black.

This statement “i want more character to my blacks by mixing my own”
is interesting to me. It says more about how your thinking about painting than about the idea of using or not using black paint out of a tube.

” yes black has its uses. but i want to master painting without a dependency of it, being that you only need the magic 4″

This statement makes no sense to me, what is the magic 4? If you want to master painting then why would it matter that you used black or not for that matter. Would not mastering the craft of painting be the isssue and not what colors one uses. Should you not master color in genral and then make dessions based on logical ideas developed from studing?

Also your stating that using it makes you dependant, I am not sure why this is a problem, how is Black differant than say Ultramarine Blue in this context, is it not how one uses it that is the issue, not the abstract idea of the paint itself?

Larry mentions using a limited palette, this is a sound and rathional idea based on wanting to work in a certin way for a result based on an idea.

You use white paint and I am sorry for being presumptious, but lets assume you do. I don’t see people saying their ‘dependant’ on that hue.
Why is this? Why is white good, and Black is bad? One could say that your ‘dependant’ on White more than Black. No?

If you want to learn to control paint why not do exercises with limited palettes. Such as doing small still lifes with White and Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Umbra. There are a lot variations on this idea. It’s a good exercise and from time to time I’ll do a few because it makes me think in a differant way. One can also paint in Black and White only, value studies.

I hardly ever use it straight out of the tube myself and I do not know of any painters who do. Except for accents in the shadows of objects that are moving away from the light source. Even then I might mix it with Permanent Alizarin and Ultramarine Blue.

Black is beautiful to me…

Links primary palettes that are good arguments on the problems with primary based palettes:

link1

link2[/URL]