09/09/2026
You know those brash, harsh pigments? The ones which come with every starter pack of paint - acidic pthalo greens and blues, cadmium red, lemon yellows. I've been doing a bit of thinning about them this week after using them in a painting as my 'go-to' colours, rather than rare boosters when intensity is needed. And after chatting to a few fellow artists and some valued collectors, I've come to some conclusions.
So image 1 is my painting using these colours. Specifically and mainly the ones I've just mentioned, but also cadmium yellow medium and cadmium orange. I found them really hard to balance, especially when I wanted to focus on soft light and colours receding into the background. Part of the problem is that their tinting strength - especially the pthalos - are so high, I'm racing around my colour theory palette to try and balance them, and my usual easy colour relationships are not there. Pthalo green and Cadmium red make an amazing chromatic black, but the balance is so delicate to get right, and it doesn't lighten well towards blue or yellow - two of the most common landscape and distance colours. I think you can see thismoat clearly in the high blueish background plant, which I was wanting to recede into the overall light coming through the greenhouse windows. But with pthalo blue, that subtly isn't there, and neither is the distance. Instead it's an intense colder colour which doesn't want to shift towards soft and warm.
I've edited the painting to make it resemble something closer to my usual colour choices. As you can feel, the soft light and distance comes racing in, but I lose some of the foreground intensity. However, everything is relative and I doubt you'd notice this unless it was displayed next to image 1. It's probably most apparent when I've added thicker paint in leaves where the light is shining through them. Usually I would using scraping back to white and glazing to achieve an intense lighting effect.
This image is a mix of the two, using the background recession of softer colours with the intensity of harsher pigments in certain areas. But I'm still not convinced. I think similar effects can be achieved with colours which are less
