Complementary neutral tones

The eye loves complementary neutrals. The eye will accept the ‘truth’ of a well placed neutral faster than it will a piece of carefully crafted modeling. Nature abounds with complementary colors. I remember as a child being amazed by the green shadows cast by the light streaming though the red curtains of my bedroom.

What is a complementary neutral? Most art students know that each color has a complementary, or opposite, color. When two opposites are mixed, the result is a neutral gray. Other important tones are those that I describe as ‘complemented tones’–tones modified with their complement. Every color can be effectively enhanced by its complement. This is especially true when painting flesh. The eye readily accepts complemented flesh tones, and their judicious use enhances the ‘truthfulness” of even the most complicated passages.

I use burnt sienna as the basis for flesh tones, and a mixture of burnt sienna and cerulean blue for transitions and shadows. The tone is labeled #7 in the photo. Cerulean blue, by the way, is an extremely useful color because it forms complementary neutrals with most orange-brown colors–a lot of colors.

Red is a notoriously difficult color for beginners to master. The key to handling red is complementary neutrals. Tone #6 is mixture of caput mortem and viridian green.  I use this mix, or other red-green mixtures, whenever I paint red. You can tame any red–or any color–with its complement. And using complemented red makes the red redder. In fact, this is a truism: complements make non-complemented passages brighter and ‘truer.’

Neutral tones

The most important colors on my palette are numbers 1 and 3. #1 is a neutral black formed by adding a small amount of burnt umber to ivory black. #2 is a middle-gray formed by adding white to #1. It’s an excellent exercise to create a range of, say, 5 – 7 neutral grays. While I seldom make the entire range anymore, I always create at least one middle-gray, as I’ve done here.

I push complements and neutrals everywhere and on everything, so when I want a cool black or gray, I want it to be really cool–even cold. So, I mix a small amount of ultramarine blue with ivory black, just enough to make it cool–not dark blue. #3 is my cool black. Even in this photograph you can see the difference between the two blacks–#’s 1, and 3.

#4 is a mixture of raw sienna and cobalt blue. It’s my neutral green.

#5 is a mixture of burnt umber and cerulean blue. It’s my warm neutral.

You might have noticed that this assortment of complemented neutrals is a palette in miniature. #1 is my bedrock neutral; #3 is blue; #4 is green; #’s 6 and 7 are red; and # 5 is yellow (brown). These tones, along with white, make all the other colors sing.