Color is an exciting element in your painting!"Each day has its own individuality of color" Charles Hawthorne To me color is the end all be all of oil painting. It is exciting using color and trying different colors. But when you are painting you need to be aware that color CONTRAST is what you are aiming for to grab your viewer and give an Impact. Grab their attention and get an emotional response out of them using color. Color sets the mood, harmony and overall style of your painting. You need to be aware of color harmony, or using color all around the painting, not just in one corner. As a beginner, you should be experimenting with color mixing and trying to make other colors with two or more colors. In the graphic below is a simple exercise to do. This is a primary color mixing to secondary colors. Try it with your own paints and see what you come up with. Just use primary colors RED, YELLOW, and BLUE. Mixing these will give you your secondary colors of green, orange, and purple.
The COMPLEMENT of a color is the color opposite on the color wheel. As a beginner I suggest you get a small color wheel to help you with the color mixing. It will take time to learn. The CHROMA is the color intensity or saturation of a color. Or how strong the color is. Warm and Cool colors have been called the reds, oranges and yellows for warm and blues, greens, and dark colors for cool colors. The temperature of the color will effect the mood of the painting. In the graphic below is my own color wheel of the colors I use when I paint. I have two gray colors that I mix up and they are a cool gray and a warm gray and my dark color that I use for dark areas. The brown colors are on the other side on the bottom for earth colors.
I will have more information on the colors I use in my painting on the page "My Pallete". This page will have the colors I use in the order I place them on my pallete.
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