Plein Air Workshops: Page 2 of 8
Creating Color Harmony With “Color Muds” The students stood at their easels while Bradford taught, listening to her instruction and experimenting with her suggestions. Creating “color muds” was the first step of the demonstration, one that would allow the artists to achieve a distinctive, unified color palette. “I’ve tried to simplify the color process with muds so that even if you’re a beginner you can create a palette of workable colors and come away with a completed painting on your first day,” Bradford told the class. Establishing a set palette before painting was a novel concept to some of the artists who were used to mixing as they go, but one that all of the students found useful. “I think it’s very helpful to mix big piles of color beforehand,” Sibyl Johnson commented. “It doesn’t hinder your process once the creativity starts flowing.”
I encourage students to express their own style. I show how I set up the tools and approach the subject, but I expect each artist to interpret it in his or her own way.”
Bradford visited the students’ easels often,
helping them overcome any challenges
or problems they were encountering.
The instructor is seen here assisting student Holli Moon.
The premise of the color-mud theory is to start with four primary shades of water-mixable oils—alizarin crimson, cadmium red light, ultramarine blue, and phthalo blue—and make all your remaining shades from these piles, always mixing a new shade from the result of the previous combination of color. “This way the colors won’t be fighting one another because they all came from the same color family,” Bradford explained. During this step of the process, the students learned one of Bradford’s secrets for achieving rich, dynamic colors. “Paint like a billionaire!” she mused, squeezing healthy amounts of paint onto her palette. “You never want to skimp on color—not on your palette and not on your canvas.” The students enjoyed being introduced to Bradford’s medium of choice, Artisan Water Mixable Oil Colour by Winsor & Newton, and found little to no difference in its working properties as compared with traditional oils. Bradford extols water-mixable oils for their easy outdoor cleanup and high pigmentation, which give them the same rich finish as traditional oils. “I really don’t see any difference between the two,” Bradford said. “I can still get the same luscious color with water-mixable oils that I get with regular oils.” More important, because water-mixable oils are made from modified oil that accepts water as a solvent, there is no need for toxic mediums. Bradford simply used Artisan Water Mixable Oil Painting Medium, designed specifically to improve water-mixable oils’ consistency, or walnut oil when she wanted to manipulate the paints’ properties. Using a Dick Blick palette knife to mix piles of blues and greens for the ocean and browns and reds for the cliffs, Bradford next instructed the students to keep looking at the various shades in the landscape as they mixed to ensure their colors were true to those in nature. Bradford continued taking a portion of color from each mud and adding yellows and reds to warm them up until she was ready to add white.
The students observed that Bradford’s color-mixing process resulted in an interesting palette of colors that were more clairvoyant than the “color-mud” label would suggest. When a mixture did take a wrong turn, Bradford quipped a typical carefree line of advice. “If you make a mistake, just wipe it off and start again,” she said. “Your painting isn’t going in a museum tomorrow, is it?”
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP:
The students gathered around Bradford’s easel as she demonstrated how to approach a seascape. Rocky
Point, Big Sur. Using a ViewCatcher viewfinder, Bradford assisted student Ellen McGrath in choosing an
interesting composition.
