Practical Colour Mixing and Tones with Mathew Lynn / 2 Day Workshop

Suitable for beginner - advanced students

Join award-winning artist Mathew Lynn on a journey focused on the practical application of your paints, and what is possible with how you mix colours and make tones.

Paints behave in a certain way because of the nature of the pigments themselves, they don’t necessarily conform to the theory of the colour wheel. When we are in the studio, we need to know and understand a different system if we are to have freedom to replicate what we are observing, or what we have in our mind in terms of achievable results with pigmented colours.

Further, tones are a fundamental part of how we understand our visual world, and something we never give a second thought to. However, when we come to trying evaluate and replicate them, we can become overwhelmed with first identifying them, and then replicating them with the subtleties of how we experience them. When you have control of tonal dynamics in your work, you will understand the very basis of what it is to ‘see’ and imagine in the visual world. When the two come together, fluency with colour and tone will be a seamless tool by which you can express anything!

There are some very useful strategies we will discuss that will help you cut through difficulties in your perception when evaluating how to represent something as it is, not how we think it is - perhaps the most important one being that everything we perceive is an abstraction until we bring our unique order to it!

The huge range of colours available can be very confusing. In this workshop we will discover how it is possible to mix virtually all colours from our quite limited paint list, so you can have the confidence to do almost anything with a limited range, and to understand when you can augment your core range with special colours when necessary.

For the first part of the day, we will methodically move through all the colours, learning how to mix and combine them, plus discussing uses of those colours and where to apply them in your actual painting practice. We will also learn how to make tones within this process, firstly in monochrome, and then how to understand colour tones.

For the second part of the day, we will apply our fresh understanding with some basic monochrome still life painting, moving on to colour with still life observation, or working from supplied images of great tonal colourists such as Clarice Beckett, or images of your own which could be landscapes or even portraits and flesh tone studies. Please bring some images of your own for this part of the day as print outs or on your tablet. It should be possible to print images on the day, so have everything on your phone also if possible.

This will be a workshop for all levels, even beginners. Mathew likes to work with people of all skill levels, and will make you feel comfortable while providing specific challenges for you!

Other key things we will cover:

• We will explore a thorough understanding of the pigments themselves, and that all pigments have their own unique qualities and behave in different ways - in terms of opacity, drying time, oil content, mixing qualities and so on.

• We will explore the difference between opaque and transparent colours and their different uses in terms of mixing and constructing a painting, understanding the difference between opaque body colour and glazing (or working more transparently).

• We will explore the fundamental importance of using actual black for mixing, as opposed to making black from combining other pigments, and understanding when to use which one.

Materials List

Oils, Acrylics and Gouache are suitable mediums for this workshop. Also, please bring an A4 sketchbook, pencils and rubber for the afternoon in case you need it for compositional studies.

Colours:
• Titanium White
• Ivory Black
• Ultramarine Blue (make sure you have standard Ultramarine)
• Yellow Ochre (Yellow Oxide)
• Indian Red (Red Oxide that has a purple hue)
• Burnt Umber
• Alizarin Crimson (or cheaper equivalent)
• Cadmium Red (or cheaper equivalent)
• Cadmium Yellow Light (or cheaper equivalent – if in doubt bring Lemon Yellow)
• Phthalo Blue
• Phthalo Green

Please make sure you have this list of colours. Bring any other colours you like to use, and Mathew can explain their qualities and ideal uses.

For oil painters Art Spectrum is a good basic artist quality range. For acrylic painters Matisse Flow or Structure is a good basic artist quality range. Gouache has a slightly different paint naming system, but always conform to the oil colours, Art Spectrum and Rowney are both good ranges and reasonably priced.

Oil Painters
(note: you must use an odourless system for oil mediums and solvents!)

• Bring a range of brushes - oil painting always requires more brushes because we need to keep colours separate on each brush.
• As we will be mixing for the first part of the day, it would be best to have at least 4 x #4 cheap flat hog bristle brushes for our mixing exercises.
• You will need two containers for solvent - a larger one for repeated cleaning of the mixing brushes, and a smaller one for clean solvent for when you paint in the afternoon.
• Plenty of rags as we will be constantly cleaning our brushes and palette.
• A roll of paper towel, as above.
• One pair of Nitrile gloves (non-latex) or whatever you like to use.
• Galkyd odourless painting medium and Gamsol odourless solvent (or equivalents).
• Palette, could be disposable - make sure your palette has plenty of mixing space. We will be cleaning the palette many times.
• Double Dipper, for separate medium and solvent. Get the open style with the widest openings, so you can get your brushes easily in and out.
• Palette knife - we will be constantly scraping paint off the palette.
• A4 Oil Painting Canvas Paper Pad - at least 10 sheets, make sure it’s a reasonable quality one such as Canson Figueras 290gsm.
• Canvas Boards or Canvases around 15”x12” (or whatever size you feel comfortable with) for the afternoon session.

Acrylic Painters

• Bring your normal range of acrylic brushes, including 3 x #4 flat for the morning mixing session, and remembering that you will be painting a work or several works in the afternoon needing a bigger range.
• Acrylic palette/s with a flat surface, or just an A3 piece of Perspex
• Acrylic Painting Medium
• Spare containers
• Rags and a roll of Paper Towel, we will be constantly cleaning the palette.
• Palette knife or spatulas
• An A4 Water Media Pad at least 210gsm and at least 10 pages, Canson Figueras 290gsm should work well for acrylics also.
• Canvas Boards or Canvases around 15”x12” (or whatever size you feel comfortable with) for the afternoon session.

Gouache Painters

• Your favourite synthetic brushes, with at least one flat about 10mm wide.
• It’s often better to have a segmented palette for gouache with some larger flat mixing areas. Or use a segmented palette and a separate flat mixing surface.
• Spare containers
• Rags and a roll of Paper Towel
• An A4 Water Media Pad at least 210gsm and at least 10 pages for the mixing exercises.
• Other paper to paint on for the afternoon sessions.

Terms & Conditions

Please choose carefully as fees are non-refundable. Refunds of course fees will only be given if the course is cancelled or a place is not available in the course.

Payment of course fees implies that you have read and agree to the WAC Terms & Conditions.