Date recorded: Friday, January 19, 2024
Medium: All
The myriad colors we observe in the natural world never fail to be convincing. But in the synthetic world of our two-dimensional paintings, how do we maintain that same sense of color harmony and cohesion? In this special Technique Takeaway, best-selling author and award-winning landscape painter Mitchell Albala explores “color grouping,” one of the key lessons from his newest book. Color grouping is a way of maintaining harmony by organizing colors into a limited number of groups or families. Derived from the natural world, color grouping is a simple practice that, when applied to our color strategy and palette, becomes a very direct way of building unified light and color in our paintings. In this session, Mitchell will demonstrate how color grouping works and how you can begin applying it in your own work.
- How subjects are evaluated in terms of color grouping
- How color groups relate in terms of hue interactions, value, and saturation levels
- How color groups are organized into major and minor color chords
- How to create simple “swatch” studies of your color groups
- How to “target” your palette to support color grouping
Mitchell Albala is an award-winning landscape painter, workshop instructor, and author. His semi-abstract and atmospheric landscapes have been exhibited nationally and are represented in corporate and private collections. He is the author of two best-selling books on landscape painting: Landscape Painting: Essential Concepts and Techniques for Plein Air and Studio Practice (Watson-Guptill, 2009), with over 60,000 copies in print; and The Landscape Painter’s Workbook: Essential Studies in Shape, Composition, and Color(Rockport Publishers, 2022), which is currently the #1 selling book on landscape in the nation. Mitchell leads plein air workshops in Italy and teaches workshops throughout the Pacific Northwest. He has lectured on Impressionism and landscape painting at the Seattle Art Museum and has written for International Artist and Artists & Illustrators magazines. Mitchell also hosts a popular painting blog, which is among feedspot.com’s “Top 100 Painting Blogs for Artists.”
