Life in neutral

How neutral colours make better paintings

We don’t live in a high colour intensity world… so why paint it that way?

I am sure you are familiar with the good old colour wheel.

This has the primary colours (red, yellow and blue) equally spaced in a circle with secondary colours (green, violet and orange) in between them, making, in effect a rainbow. These colours are high chroma (intensity) and usually very pretty.

However they are not much use in a painting as they don’t really reflect the world around us. Unless we use them in a rainbow or a flower, or in a bright umbrella or some other man-made thing, then they shouldn’t really be found in our paintings.

Most of our world exists in the neutralised colours that we find towards the centre of the colour wheel. Almost every colour in nature is neutralised. This may seem a bit dull, but it’s true. Take a look at these photos below.

Original photo (left) and saturated colour (right)

The original photo which captured the colours pretty well shows them to be desaturated (neutralised or dulled). When I increase the saturation (right) the scene looks artificial and cartoon-ey. But unfortunately this is sometimes how we paint.

Now, I know that there are schools of colourists who make amazing art by pushing the saturation. But I’m suggesting here that to make ‘realistic’ art we need to neutralise most, if not all of the tube colours that we use.

What do you think?

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