Bill Perkins Color Notes

Several years ago Bill Perkins from Disney came to Provo and gave a small workshop. These are the notes I took from his workshop.

Elements of Color, Chapter 4

Grey and Brown

-more paintings fail because of too much intense color rather than too much gray

        -”better gray than garish.” Ingres

-one must resist the tendency to see grays or browns as dirty, they are not: they are the “chef’s sauce” of the picture

-cure for the “fruit salad disease” in a painting (to much pure color) is good value organization. Plan before the final colors are mixed. Try a simple color scheme with one strong chromatic color supported by a range of neutrals and complements. All well placed grey makes pure color sing.

Handling Green

    -banish green pigments from palette, mix them from yellows and blues

        -resulting mixtures will be weaker and more varied, both qualities that you want

    -avoid monotony

-vary your mixtures at both the small scale (leaf to leaf) and large scale (tree to tree)

-mix up a supply of pink or reddish grey on your palette and weave it in and out of the greens

-prime canvas with pinks or reds, and allow it to show through at times to enliven the greens

Color Relationships

Light and Form Chapter 3

Form 

    -the terminator (bedbug line)- form transitions from light into shadow

-light rays from the source are tangent to the edge of the form

-soft indirect light the transition from light to shadow at the terminator will be more gradual

    -form shadow begins just beyond the terminator

-outdoor light usually modifies the shadow planes, depending on how much they face upward

    -reflected light often raises the tone of the shadow

-light bouncing up off the ground surface or from other surfaces

-shadows upfacing planes are cool and downfacing planes are warm

-reflected light falls off quickly as you get farther away from the source, unless it’s large

-color of the shadow is the sum of all sources of reflected illumination, combined with the local color of the object

-on a sunny day, vertical surfaces in shadow usually receive two sources of illumination: warm ground light and blue sky light

-darkest parts of the shadow are at the points of contact, occlusion shadow

    -another dark part is the area just beyond the terminator, core shadow

-core shadow only forms if the secondary source of light doesn’t overlap too much with the main light

        -painting it even if you can’t see it can give the form more impact

    Cast Shadows

        -suggest depth or tie together elements inside and outside of a composition

        -parallel pattern of light and shadow is an effective device to create depth

        -sunny days cast shadows tend to be blue, because they look up to the sky

-partly cloudy days, the light is more white and sometimes the blue is small, other sources are more dominant

        -cast shadow is closely related to the light source

        -soft light will cast a shadow with blurry lines

        -hard light will cast a shadow with a sharp edge

        -two side by side lights will cast side by side shadows

-the edge of every shadow gets softer as the distance increases from the object 

Half shadow

-to create drama, especially with a vertical form, light the top half and leave the rest in shadow

    Highlight

-highlight on any glossy form is not a pure white, but a combination of the color of the source and the local color of the object

    -grouping planes can simplify complex scenes

        -top planes

        -side planes in lighter halftones

        -front planes in darker halftones

        -side planes in shadow

-common mistake in painting textural form in sunlight is to make it equally prominent throughout the form (light and dark areas)

-texture in shadow should not be just a darker version of the texture in light, that is not how the eye sees it

-texture difficult to see in the shadow region, more visible in the fully lit areas especially in the darker halftone just before the terminator - half-light

-soft or diffuse light gives no distinct light side, shadow side, terminator or core. All upward-facing planes tend to be lighter since they receive more of the diffused light from the cloudy ceiling

Light and Shadow

-in sunlight the light and dark side of a form can be separated by as many as 5 steps of the tonal scale

        -in sunlight a white newspaper in shadow is darker than a black shirt in the light