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I recently posted a blog about colour wheels, and in that post, I focused on three colours and how they mix together – ultramarine blue, cadmium-free yellow medium and cadmium-free red medium. Today, I’m creating a painting using just those three colours.
This is a great exercise to help understand the range of colours you can mix just using three colours, and is a wonderful way to take colour theory and make it real. To get started, take a look at my blog post on the colour wheel, where I talk about the three colours more in depth.
After I finished my colour wheel, I looked at the colours I can mix using ultramarine blue, cadmium-free yellow medium and cadmium-red medium. I could see some very dark greens and blues. That inspired me to pull up a photo I took on a hike last summer. It was in the mountains of Canada and had a small river, a pine forest, and a mountain in the distance. It is a great subject that would allow me to make use of the dark greens and blues that I can mix with the colours on this colour wheel.
Painting using a triad
When choosing your triad of colours, use tubes of paint that are about equidistant on the colour wheel from each other. You’re not limited to the primaries, but that’s the best place to start. In this case, I’m using what I consider the “classic” primaries. Other people consider different colours to be the classics, and I’ll explore many combinations in future posts.
I highly recommend deciding what colours you want as your main, or dominant, colour in the painting, then another colour as your supporting, or intermediate, colour. This second colour will be used less than the dominant colour. And the third colour is the subordinate colour. For this painting, I’ll be using blue as my dominant colour, with yellow as the intermediate. I will only be using red as a neutralizer and as a ground colour.
When you look at the final painting, you might wonder where the blue and yellow is, since it’s mostly shades of green. I consider blue the main colour because most of the greens are heavily blue. The yellow greens cover less of my painting but seem prominent because they are used as highlights. Finally, I only used red in two ways. The first is as the ground, allowing peeks of pure red to show through here and there. I also used red to neutralize some of the greens.
Watch me paint a landscape using just three colours on my Youtube channel.
Note that I use three colours plus titanium white, which is used to adjust values. You can also use cadmium paint, instead of the cadmium-free version, and get similar results.
Buy the supplies
Pick up the supplies for this painting at your local art supply store or on Amazon:
US
- Ultramarine blue
- Cadmium yellow medium
- Cadmium-free red medium
- Titanium white
- Canvas panels
- Princeton Aspen flat size 6
