Whatever the comp0sition is, whether a landscape or a portrait, try painting it without applying middle values. If your painting uses shadows or shade, paint them black (nothing in the middle). If it is light, paint it white (nothing in the middle). Are you beginning to get the picture? It is nothing but black and white. There are no grays. If you’ve never tried painting a picture with only black and white, I highly recommend it. You will learn much about contrasting values when you do; and, later, when you do finish the work in color, you’ll feel comfortable that you have a true handle on this issue. The effort will be well worth it.

After you’ve experimented with the exercise above, then it is fair to say that color (and its use) is everything in any painting other than a black and white composition.

So often, as artists, we tend to feel we naturally know how to mix colors. However, I’m not the first artist to admit the importence to whip out the color wheels. Sometimes it’s necessary to accomplish a completed painting. It is necessary for an artist to understand words like “triadic color wheel,” or “primary,” “secondary,” or “tertiary” color schemes.

Color plays a large part in setting the mood in a composition. Certainly, a well thought out composition has much to do with the mood in a painting, but the composition, and color working together is really what sets it. A good example of this is Andrew Wyeth’s painting: Christina’s World.

A figure crawling through a large field of grass is the composition setting the (alone and desperate) mood. However, it is the mauve (or pinkish) dress surrounded by the brownish grass directing the viewers eyes to the undefined farm buildings in the distance (a great distance for Christina to crawl) that works with the composition to set the mood.

Try imagining this same picture with any other colors and see if any depicts the mood as well as the colors use by Wyeth in the finished painting.

This is just one simple example, but there are plenty of examples where an artist has used both color and composition to control and set the mood of a painting.

The depiction of Christina’s World on this sight is for educational purposes only, and it is not used to depict the true value of the painting, nor to indicate it is a proper depiction of the painting.

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Here’s one of my favorite oil paintings by Texas artist, Lynn Burton. You can shop and visit his gallery at (click here) http://fineartamerica.com/