Come Asway with Me, Acrylic on Canvas by Cindy Davie, 12″ x 12″

1. FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN: – Before you begin painting, cover your entire canvas with a orange or red base coat. Then put your sketch down and begin to paint, ignoring this base color. Tiny little bits and pieces of the color will show through and help tie the whole thing together. The first time I did this, I had zero confidence that this would work. But it does. Painters have been using this little trick for centuries.

2. KNOW YOUR LIMITS: Try using a limited palette. Don’t use secondary colors straight out the tube. Make your own using your primaries. Stick with one or two blues, one or two reds, one or two yellows. Make your own greens, purples, and oranges. These secondary colors will harmonize better with your primary colors because they are children of these primary hues. Throw in a couple earth colors and white and black and you have yourself a limited palette. After you work with this awhile, you may find you may also be able trim down to only one of each primary color most of the time.

3. DUMMY DOWN: Decide on one or two dominant colors: dummy down the others. Use gray or the color’s complement to de-intensify the non-dominate colors in your painting. You can also try adding earth colors to bring the intensity down.

4. SWAMP MONSTER: Transitional colors should be murky and not noticeable. Study paintings in a museum up close and you will find that what appears to your brain a white might actually be gray or blue. The brain will interpret color for the eye. You don’t always have to paint with actual color of an object. Use a murky, vague substitute for some of the less important areas of your painting to this will bring excitement to your focal point and will help with color harmony.

5. NAPLES: Use Naples yellow to lighten yellows, oranges and reds. This helps avoid chalky, flat tints. Using Naples yellow to lighten with this color made a big difference for me and seemed to pull the painting all together. Hint: Naples yellow doesn’t work too well when lightening blue hues. Duhh, they will lean toward green this way. Go buy a tube of Naples yellow if you don’t already have one.

These tips are written for oil painter but would apply to acrylic painters. The names of the hues might change but the concepts don’t. I am not a experienced art teacher or expert in color theory. I will say that I am an experienced painter. I have learned most of what I know the hard way, buy spending a lot of time painting, not talking about it in a classroom.

These are practical tips that I have used, day in and day out, while in my studio. They are simple enough for me to remember without getting bogged down in too much technical jargon. I have given them nicknames or cliches so that when I am painting, they will pop into my head easier.

I didn’t invent these tips. If you read about painting very much you will come across them over and over. They work on both abstract and realist styles. Keep in mind they are just tips, try them out, if they help you great. If they don’t, forget them. You must never forget to find your own path to your painter’s voice.