This month, I am returning to the color BROWN. In the December 2005 tip page, I looked at BROWN and how I mix browns. I continue to have browns in tubes sitting in a storage drawer. My favorite browns are still mixes that I have made on the palette or paper.
There are many varieties of the brown hue available in the marketplace.
Raw Umber
with orange with blue
Burnt Umber
with orange with blue
Vandyke Brown
with orange with blue
Sepia
with orange with blue
Applied to a white paper, there is very little light coming through the color. I have found many of these members of the brown family to be flat in appearance. They also, can be opaque. With either a warm hue or a cool hue dropped into the brown while it is wet, there is light and transparency.
Palette mix orange & blue dropped in
When mixing several colors on the palette, the resulting color will often be brownish in hue. One color is not dominating the mix. It is what artists call MUD. I believe MUD to be a technique, a way of applying the color or over mixing it, not a color. MUD is a lack of light. By dropping in a chromatic color into the MUD color, the light will be there.
My best browns continue to be mixes that I have created. Think of brown as being a member of the orange family that has been muted or de-saturated. Brown will contain the primaries – yellow, red, and blue- with the yellow and red dominating the mix. Here are some examples.
Gamboge
Cadmium Orange
Vermilion
Phthalocyanine Green
Each line of color consists of mixes using the first color and the line of color above each mixed color. The idea was to look for a yellow/red dominance in the mix and blue as the de-saturating color. When mixed as a wet in wet mix on the paper, these colors will be truly beautiful.
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