Pat Fiorello - Art Elevates Life

Art & Inspiration from professional artist and instructor Pat Fiorello. Pat is known for her romantic landscape, garden and floral paintings in oil and watercolor. Her paintings often depict beautiful places like Italy and France. Pat teaches painting workshops in the U.S., Caribbean and Europe. She is passionate about inspiring others to include art in their life. Whether creating it or simply appreciating and enjoying it, there are so many ways that art elevates life!

Friday, July 22, 2011

Color Charts #12 Viridian

Viridian is a useful color. It's bark is worse than it's bite. It looks very strong on it's own, but it has a very low tinting power ( especially when compared to the stronger thalo green which looks similar in hue but is much more stronger in mixes). Viridian adds a subtle green to it's mixing partners without overpowering. Its offers a way to neutralizing colors without altering them too much.





When combined with a little Cadmium Red, it produces an almost perfect grey. And I never would have thought of adding it to Magenta to get a lovely range of lavenders- but it works (column 9). I've concluded this is a very handy color to have on your palette.

 The Holbein brand of Viridian seems to be particularly rich- that's my favorite brand for this color.  Beware of paints labeled Viridian "hue". The notation "hue" on a paint label often indicates that the manufacturer has found substitutes to mix together to simulate the desired color. It can be similar (and is usually cheaper) but sometimes can be radically different. I've bought Cobalt Blue Hue before and it was more like a thalo blue than a true cobalt- so be careful with those "hues"

If this is your first visit to my blog, see the July 2011 Archives for other colors in this study. This is the last of the 12 basic color studies from the "official" color study plan, but this process prompted me to do a few other charts which I thought might be really useful, so stay tuned ( all will be posted by the end of July).

2 comments:

  1. Pat, I have really enjoyed reading about your color charts. This is such good information. Thank you for taking the time to document and write about your experience. I have read Richard Schmid's Alla Prima, and am slowly working on this exercise myself.

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  2. Linda, Thanks for your comment, I'm glad you are inspired to keep working on your charts. They definitely build a sense of confidence in controlling color and value. Stay tuned, today I will be posting a summary of lessons learned from this whole process. If you have any questions along the way feel free to get in touch. Also, I am hoping to inspire other artists to take on painting challenges for learning( this was one I always had on my list to do "someday", but glad I finally took it on), so feel free to share my blog with other artists you know. I plan to have the complete color study from start to finish in my archives for July 2011.
    Happy Painting!

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