John Wellington Color Theory Masterclass

hi I'm John Wellington I'm an artist and teacher of Art and painting especially uh old Master techniques of painting I teach in New York City at the New York Academy of Art the School of Visual Arts I have my own natalier and I'm just very interested in the process of creating and why we do the things we do as painters uh like many of you I was taught by people that came out of newer traditions of painting which aren't that new anymore but uh 100 years old abstract painting and so I spent a lot of

my younger years and still to this day trying to learn how painters that painted 200 years ago 300 years ago 500 years ago a thousand years ago did their work what they used uh I'm not I don't teach materials and techniques but of course trying to learn this you're always trying to learn materials and techniques so today what I want to talk about is black and the reason why I want to talk about black is because that was a color I was told at my art school and my pre-art school and my postart school never

to use don't use black I'm not sure how many of you have been told that but I'm going to guess it's more than three of you watching right now so the question I wish I had asked but didn't is why shouldn't I use black I never got an answer and I never asked the question but we did make our blacks we made our blacks out of lizar and crimson and phthalo green we Mi made our blacks out of dark blues and dark Browns uh anything but black to make our black in other words we were

using often very expensive pigments to recreate a very inexpensive pigment and as I started studying more Old Masters especially uh rbrand and vermier even Van Go I mean just countless Goya I started seeing that all their paintings had black there Velasquez and mané and Monae all the Impressionists used black and I I just couldn't understand again why I wasn't supposed to use black now over the years I have understood the reason that they didn't explain so black is a color and the thing about black is you don't want to rely on it to darken and

that's what our teacher should have told us they should have said use black but don't use it just to make something dark and I'm going to give you an example I'm going to paint a lemon so here I'm going to I'm going to do something I don't usually do and I I'm starting with my lights so I don't usually start with my lights when I paint usually start with the dark like I'm drawing but for this I'm going to do a lemon or something that looks like a lemon hopefully so let me just uh just

get this up as fast as possible and I'm going to do almost like a graphic in other words I'm not doing light and Shadow I'm just uh just putting this up as fast as possible this is my Bob Ross moment making my happy lemon and this is the reason that they didn't want us to use black because the problem is when you don't know how to use black you think you're going to darken a color with it and so what I'll do it's a very transparent color I'm using let me see if this oh it's

more opaque now I'll start to oh there we go so there's my light and I'm going to do half of this with darkening with black let's say I'll do like that we'll see so now I'm going to mix black to darken for my shadow my Shadow's going to be here actually take that away for now so I'll have a shadow there and this will be my light area here I'll even make a more highlight so you can see there we go and that's going to be my shadow so now to make I'm using these lemon

these uh yellows and now I'm going to take a black right here and I'm going to darken it you see that and look what color I get when I darken with black you get green that's why they don't want you to rely on black because black is a color and so if you just rely on darkening everything with black in fact you're making a color choice and that's what they should have told us because if you're painting a lemon in fact you don't want to darken with black just going to clean my brush and I'll

show you what you do want to darken with because it's warm you will want to darken with a brown so really all those years of not using black we more what they should have said is don't rely on black and that will bring me to my next color so I'll just finish this lemon just to talk about what our art teachers were mentioning and I will use [Music] brown right here I'm using some raw Sienna and yellow and this would be maybe the shadow of a lemon redder warmer and I'm not saying you can't use

black but maybe you don't rely on the black you want to hit a warmer tone you see I hope that reads in here just to and just to keep with the theme of our art teachers I won't use black for my cast Shadow so right now I'm just putting down a quick cast Shadow and make that lemon stay just because I'm a painter and I'm going to Noodle I'll take a dry brush and I'm just going to soften the shadow now I basically just went with an an ultramarine is color I don't know if it

my brush was a little dirty but the idea was to um just get something down but that's that is the I so what I'm really trying to talk about here is black about the use of black and how great black is but this is a demo of maybe why not to use black and so even again in the shadow if I want to use pure blue for example that would be a very fist thing to do which is about um not worrying about your color but just worrying about your value that van go did that

uh countless artists did that and the idea that you that value is more important than color which is a different talk but it is true something to think about that if you understand value you can use any color and if you don't understand value no color will save you so going back to color and to Value this black makes green and that's what our art teachers should have probably told us is that don't rely on black but use it so now I did a fuxon my lemon which is I made green so black and yellow

makes green I'm going to put down my pallet and we're going to go to a table palet so here I have uh I think a lamp black and I have some sort of yellow here I'm not I'm not sure if it's a cadmium yellow light or something but it's a very bright and I'm going to take my black and I'm going to take my yellow now many many years ago pigments were extraordinarily expensive they were were so expensive in fact that they were in the contracts of commission paintings so if you're using lapis lazle let's

say for the robe of a Madonna that was listed because that was one of the things that the patron the buyer was going to purchase for you and make sure you had money for and so people were very careful about the colors they used they had often very specific importance and other words in other words you wouldn't might not use lapis lazle if you're painting the sky unless you had an abundance of riches now there are exceptions I think that vermier did use lapis lazle which is a the blue uh from the stone lapis that

is found in Afghanistan I think vermier used it in the walls of one of the paintings that's at the Metropolitan Museum of Art it's insane that he might have done that but after all he was in Amsterdam and he was around u a lot of color and color Traders and Merchants so he might have done something as nutty as that but that is nutty so painters like rbrand for example and numerous others would make their greens with using black black and Lead yellow for example uh they would make Velasquez would often make Blues using black

and white on a warmed ton uh Canvas OR panel and right here you can see this is warm toned because the warm toned canvas makes a blue a black and white look bluish now it's not going to look blue next to ultramarine blue or to phthalo blue or magnesium or Cobalt but it will look blue in relation to the other colors he might have used so if you take out the modern pigments or the high chroma pigments you start to have a subtler palette and a number of old master paintings are in fact subtler palettes

with moments of color and we in the 20th and 21st century have grown up with abundance of colors we open up our drawers in our Studios we see three different oranges and eight different yellows and you know nine different blues and reds it's overwhelming it's wonderful it's an abundance of riches that many of us have in our studio without even thinking of it that way they didn't have that but what they did have was a creativity to push the paint they had to do amazing things and so there was a poetry that they often got

that I'm not saying you can't have but it's a little lost and one of these is in my lemon demo this idea of making green with black and yellow so here I you can see I've mixed a bright yellow and the black and I'm going to also go back to my childhood because where I was first taught about mixing green was in grammar school and it wasn't black and yellow but as we all know how do you make green blue and yellow chromatic Wheels that's what it tells us and that's the rule only that isn't

the rule that painters used for thousands of years it's a new rule it's a great rule but it's not the Only Rule so the idea of mixing a black and yellow makes a very different green and here I mixed a darker version a lighter version and I'll even make an even lighter version right here and I like to think of this color for myself as a ver Noir I name it ver Noir because I study French every single day of my life and at my very best I can speak almost passible frang and French will

evade me until I I'm no longer here so I like ter ver Noir because it makes me feel sophisticated and it makes me think that my French lessons are doing something useful so here I have three greens and now I'm going to put them up on the canvas with a pallet knife and you can see here's a light green green here's a middle green or that's actually pretty dark green and here's a very dark green but it's still greenish it's going to look different than a pure black and I'll do a pure black just so

you can see the difference so here we can see the green next to the black now this is a Joseph now I'm going to go to 20th century to Joseph Alber and Jose of Albert's color theory which is that no color exists in a vacuum every color changes based on what it's painted next to so relationships in color are very important in fact for an artist they're crucial I can take one color without mixing it and put it on three different backgrounds and make them look like three different values and three different colors so the

reason to put the black here and actually if I was really on top of my game I put the black right next to it to see the true comparison is by comparison this no longer looks black by comparison that looks Greener do you see and if anybody is familiar with Joseph alur's Square paintings you'll see that I've just started doing a Joseph Alber although his would be concentric squares so what it's next to will affect it and I'll just further this because I find this to be if you don't understand that there is no such

thing as a fixed or true color you're missing one of the biggest points of color color will be changed by the lighting that it's under that's why so often we take our paints that we painted in studio light and we see them outside they look faded and weird and we like this doesn't look like anything I painted but that's because different light affects the way you see color and what it's next to affects it so here we see the same green looking slightly different this one in fact looks brighter this one looks a little bit

duller a little bit more subdued next to what it is so I'm using lamp black which is originally the lamp soot the soot from a lamp uh there is also Ivory black which was named Ivory black because once upon a time it was a burnt ivory tusk uh which they for many many years don't no longer use but they do use animal bone for Ivory for good Ivory blacks and that's known also as bone black so if you're a vegan you do not want to use uh Ivory black I am not and therefore I I

do there's also lamp black these blacks all have different temperatures uh some are warmer some are cooler and it even depends on the manufacturer it's very hard to make a blanket statement it's usually you have to test the pigments with white and compare for yourself but all of them will make a green when mixed with yellows and also the same should be said with the yellows I used a very bright yellow but if you take raw Sienna that's going to make a completely different green meaning just with black and yellows you can make a your

Entre a brand new entire tube set of greens that just don't exist otherwise that you cannot make with blues and uh it I would say it's almost uh infinite so now on my pallet SL portable table you can see the greens I premixed on the taboret palette and that was with one of these bright yellows and now I'm going to take a much more earthy yellow as a matter of fact it's Earth or dirt and this is dirt from a town in Italy called Sienna and I'm going to take this color you can see what

it looks like on its own I'm going to take this dirt and now I'm going to add black to it and we'll see what type of green this produces and you can see it's a much more subtler green this is a green you'll often also see in many old Master paintings so these variations of green between a little bit more High chroma which were done originally with lead tin yellow and now uh with Replacements like cadmium yellows or uh synthetic substitutes and this now is with raw Sienna so you can just see how two different

yellow greatly affect the green this one high chroma this one low chroma so without and you notice I don't have any greens on my palette I have these mixed greens which are the black and the bright yellow I have this green which is very Rim brany which is and you'll see it in rbrand uh which is a black and a raw Sienna I have some blues which I haven't used yet I have um a burnt umber which is dirt from the town of Umbria or that region Umbria that has been burnt and I have burnt

sienna next to my raw Sienna again yes you're right if you guessed it both dirt from around the town of Sienna one raw and one burnt and when it's raw it looks yellowish and when it's burnt it looks reddish and although this canvas color here is not burnt sienna it feels like it's in the burnt Sienna family uh also uh the jargon for this covering in ital Italian it's called um imprimatura impr prematur is when you cover the white canvas and the reason why you cover the white canvas in the tone whether it's gray or

brown or whatever tone is so that you can work both your lights and your darks at the same time if you're working on a white canvas you can only work dark if you worked on a black canvas you can only work light but on a midtone canvas you're able to work your values to the darker and to the lighter and not every artist work like this but most of the older painters had in impr prematuras by the time you get to Vincent Van go for example you'll notice that when you see look at star night

and you look at a detail online a megapixel detail you'll see actually white canvas through the hatch marks of his imposto paint his thick paint so it's just something to think about so I made a choice in this color for this demonstration so now what I'm going to just show you is in terms of landscape how this might work so I'll work right here and let's uh oh I'm before I do that I'm actually going to also show you I have two Browns here the burnt sienna uh and the burn umber but let's say I

didn't have the burn umber in my palette and I have this color which is not going to read well on this because it just looks like a darker version this this is the burnt sienna but if I add some black to it I actually start to get a color that looks like burnt umber so this is another use of black that in within a minute allows you to adjust from burnt sienna to burn umber or something that looks like burn umber a dark brown this is just all the things that I never learned in art

school all these uses of black now if you were to ask me John do you always use black then to make this color do you always use black to mix your greens I'd say sometimes but not all the time of course I put out burn umbers I put out greens I love all the colors available I'm absolutely not a purist to any Century or any time I use whatever works and so what I'm always teaching is never the way it's always options and this is what I think I've tried to do for 30 years as

a teacher is never try and talk about a style of art or a method or this is how you must do it it it's just all choices and here's the great thing because it's art all your choices are right every choice is right if it works for you not even if it pleases your family but if it works for you then those choices are right so if you make a black with a yellow for a green and it works even if let's say you want to do a green lemon you know I grew up reading

a book called Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss so you can certainly have a green lemon but if you don't that's another choice so these are just all choices and once you know that it gives you the freedom to make mistakes it makes the gives you the freedom to create and in fact this is how art styles change and how perception changes is not just by what we think of our successes but what we do by the chances and even what are sometimes perceived as failures that we make sometimes takes a whole world of

Art in a New Direction and and certainly can take yourself in a New Direction so again everything that I'm talking about here are options in expansion and I think that's why this is so important for me to talk about because sometimes in my life we've had I think in all our lives is in every subject we've had people who are absolutists this is the way you do it don't use black do it this way don't do that and the way they say it is so convincing but really when you think about it beyond the statement

it's very limiting and one of the things if you're watching this right now which means you're interested in painting and you're choosing to buy beautiful brushes and paints and think about this the last thing you want to do is be limited you want to be expansive in the way you think in the way you paint in the Styles because it all exists so now I'm going to go back to My Demo which will be just a tree and that's why I went with the Browns so actually since I have this here I will actually use

the raw Sienna I mean the burnt sienna and some black just since I'm on a black mode Let's do a trunk now you do have to understand that I'm live in New York City and there are no trees there so I'm doing this out of imagination from something of what I'd imagine a tree might look like right we just have taxi cabs and subways and concrete I think there's a tree that grew in Brooklyn I'm starting with a structure which is the trunk and going out to the arteries the limbs I won't do the whole

tree because we don't need the whole tree for this so I'm going to give you a rule and I'm always hesitant to to give rules because I think that rules are meant to be broken bent discarded ignored and disobeyed in art um but rules should be learned and one of the rules is start with your darks now I didn't do that with my lemon but I'm doing it here because it's like drawing and right now what I'm doing is I'm drawing with a dark and drawing with a dark it's easier to make changes can wipe

it away if I had white paint on my or some of the yellows it would it would mush so this is easier for Corrections for making changes quick and uh so it's a great thing to to be able to know to do if you're learning and you're struggling like oh my God how do I start a painting start with your darks because it will work now that doesn't mean that you should start with your darks all the time after you've done it but it always works and certainly if I'm painting for all of you I

want something that works this is not the time I want to be experiment ing wildly so now I have my darks here and my next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to do a dark green so I'm going to do this black green this one right and I'm going to go thin ER so there is a rule in oil paint that you might have heard and the rule is transparent in the shadows opaque in the lights it's not not it's an interesting rule it's a rule that sort of feels true often in nature

but I find the rule too limiting uh because it makes you feel you have to be transparent in the shadows and you have to be opaque in the lights and that doesn't follow all the art I see that's great so I adjusted the rule for myself and when I teach to [Music] be shadows and the darks push towards pull towards the transparent and the lights pull not to the opaque but to the imposto to thicker than opaque opaque is our walls but that's a very flat but brighter than opaque is actually imposto paint like you'd

see in a van Gogh a Lucian Freud a rbrand a France Halls uh certainly all the Monae water lily paintings um so I like to think so I am so but I am starting if not transparent in my shadows I'm starting semi-transparent there's many different ways of applying paint and you should learn them all and they all work when you need them so here I'm getting I'm starting with my darks again just like the tree just like the trees I have no idea what my tree looks like probably won't look like a real tree we

see couple leaves here and I should mention that in every painting i' I'm doing for you guys I have a light source the light is hitting me uh from up here so that light has continued to hit towards my lemon and it's going to hit my tree like that too so my dark side if you notice so the tree is here and my dark side of my leaves are on this side and you notice as I'm working I'm getting a little bit more opaque because I'm getting a little bit more sure of where I want

to go so you might ask yourself well how are you getting more opaque or more um transparent and the answer is two answers one is the touch of the brush like that and the other is using a medium which is off camera but it's in a cup right here and a medium is something that's different than a mineral spirits it's something that extends the paint so your mineral spirits are used to clean your paint but a medium is used to extend it because if you clean overuse a mineral spirit as a medium what you do

is you dissolve something called a binder which binds the pigment together which is why it cleans so well and the binder and oil paint for all of you who don't know is linseed oil so mediums are a subject I'm not going to get into because uh it's ever it's ever changing but I will say the mediums I like are something that does the job that I need done which for me is to work on a painting for many months and not feel like I'm fighting the medium and also something that dries relatively quickly I don't

want to wait a week for my painting to dry I want to wake wake up in the morning and know I can paint again so I need a medium that dries and sets quickly and there are many mediums out there and the main thing is you have to just be sensitive and you find the one that you like I think that's the most important thing so I'm going to just go now that I've hit this you can see now that can build up my darks go a little bit more opaque is now in my shadows

I'm not going to go imposto at least not at this moment I don't think I will but you can even though I say pulls towards the imposto you will go and look at old Master paintings and you'll see an area of darks that's thick paint so these are why they're just rule they're rules as guidelines not rules as never do this and be suspect anytime you know there are certain things you should never do don't eat M&M's after you've been painting with lead white and cadmium red don't do that wash your hands wear gloves there

are certain don'ts but when it comes to rules in within art you do what works no matter what someone tells you so I'm doing my Strokes just so you know I'm just doing Strokes it look like I don't know I'm using a brush like this and I'm doing kind of like leaf type Strokes or and if you ask me what type of tree this is I would lie and say it's a maple but it I don't think it is so anyway I have some sort of tree here and I have the darks so now and

this again this green is just black black and yellow now I'm going to go with my middle green black and yellow but with more yellow and start to bring out middle lights perf it go a little bit more opaque there we go I often like to go a little bit less opaque um what I teach is something I teach often indirect painting which is uh G ey which means an underpainting monochromatically often in Gray or in green or in in in fact in Greens using terver or vidiian uh or Blues I teach glazing and layering

but what I really like to think of my teaching is really more about the history of the paint of rather than my paintings looking like I've painted your bathroom wall for you I want my paintings to feel like I paint Ed your bathroom wall but I did a bad job and you saw that the wall underneath was once red and underneath that it was once blue and underneath that so it has that pediment that that history of the paint and you'll see that sometimes when you go to an antique store they often fake it turns

out that idea of like multiple layers of paint and paint peeling and chipping and because it's actually aesthetically pleasing but when you look at a lot of paint paintings uh paintings by Monae the G men mon water lies if you ever look closely or photograph it with your your phone and and blow it up you're just going to see layers through the layers of these imposto and scumbled surfaces this history of the paint and now you might say well what's so great about history of the paint and if you ask me that I would say

it gives depth to the painting so it's something that I'm interested in of course like all things it doesn't make great art but it's something I find very beautiful and when I'm looking at vermeir or angs or rebrands or uh you know just hundreds and hundred thousands of painters I just love looking at that old uh the portraits of the fian portraits uh from Egypt that were done 2000 years ago in EN costic and you see the hatch marks in the history I find it incredibly seductive so right now in this case we're doing history

of the paint because in fact if the camera was up close you could see the Brown impr prematur coming through the sort of dark washes and you can see that as I'm coming closer to you with the leaves what's happening is the paint is getting a little bit pulling towards the opaque not fully opaque well fully opaque in some areas but it's getting more and more opaque and as I get lighter it'll get even more opaque and maybe who knows maybe I'll even get imposto if I have enough paint just depends on how much so

and as I also see it it's almost like sculpting it's almost like I'm pulling the lights out of the darks so right now I'm going to go to uh the trunk just to P pull up some lights I'll stay away from White how's that I like so by the way uh that's a whole another subject but cooling your colors with white is like darkening your colors of black you should do it however cooling your colors with white cools down your color neutralizes your color which is a great thing to know but in this case I'm

going to go for something I'm going to see how this works for now uh which I cooled it down with yellow and in fact I don't like it because it looks too close to my imprimatur so I'm now going to do white instead and this is one of the things I always do with painting is I always test what I'm doing I don't just blindly mix a color and then start painting I it's it's like cooking it's like cooking it's like add a little salt taste the soup what does it need that's how I think

about color that's why I like my my e my palette my portable table right near me so I can make these decisions quickly so now if I add white here and who knows maybe I'll even add a black to neutralize it even more let's see how that works uh yeah because I need something brighter adding a little yellow I don't know what I'm doing and sometimes people ask me well how do you mix the right color and my answer is I just keep adding pepper salt a little ginger a little something until I get the

flavor I like just like cooking little adjustments so if you notice for this type of painting I don't pull it from the top because that's like taking my salt shaker and just dumping it over it's pinches of color it's pinches of ingredients to adjust slowly because I can't take the salt out of the soup and if I take my color from here I can't take it out of my my paint so I rather do my adjustments and add as I need so I take it from the inside again this is for this type of painting

if I was painting like duning or Jean Michelle basat this would not be important but this is for an older way of painting older way of seeing now I'm working a little bit more direct if you notice I'm not using medium because I just want to build up these lights quick and because I'm working on a brown inatur brown is not going to work for my trunk because it would be like camouflage you wouldn't see it so let me get get some trunks in get some lights again no medium because I really want uh these

brights to stand out when I ever I do these demos I truly appreciate how amazing Bob Ross was if you notice I'm doing something that I won't recommend I've married my brush so marrying your brush means when you sort of get into just using one brush for everything uh often when I'm at home I I don't marry my brush I have I'm I'm going back and forth for different things but I think be just to make things faster and not cleaning all the time or changing I'm just using one brush all right well you know

this can go on and on so now I'm going to knock out some of these and that's one of the great things I love about oil painting as well it's the ability to correct your corrected Corrections so if I want to take out this glob here I can just take it out with my brush like that and now I can actually even bring some greens back over and now I gotten some whites in my greens by accident so I will get to that because I one thing I have not mixed in my greens are whites

so you can see how the building up of color is infinite because I haven't even touched white yet and there's nothing wrong with white this is just a brighter green and let's build it up here you see again no green from the tube this is all leading to somewhere one it's to make you think about I mean it's leading on the short term to make you think about black and about colors and about mixing differently but the other thing was that I was given the opportunity to to make a black green and the idea that

rather than always having to mix a black green that I had a great base coat and eventually I'm going to show you that but right now I thought before I did this I wanted to just show you the possibilities that these mixed greens have and maybe you can see now I'm no more medium and this I'm whoops whoops is a technical term meaning uh oh I messed up but that's okay an oil paint everything can be corrected and if you can't work on it anymore tomorrow's another day and you can start over all again I

live by as an artist and in life I correct my corrected Corrections I am never been a person that gets it right the first time so oil paint is one of my preferred mediums my other of course would be gouache which unlike watercolor you're building up with oil and therefore it's great for artists that make lots of mistakes should and the freedom to make mistakes the freedom to make changes really gives you the freedom to create for me and thankfully I'm not uh sculpting in carara Marble like Michelangelo where one wrong chip takes off an

arm and do a couple more Strokes and if you get up close to the painting you can see that in fact you can feel the imprimatur coming through to make this tree sing of course could put Sky start to put down this is another black green but now with white added um if I'm going to do the shadow go more transparent let me get the black again with a yellow you know for cast Shadow and there's many things you can do but once you realize you have this freedom to play with colors to not to

break through what we might have which some of you might have been taught which I certainly was taught uh it just gives you a lot of freedom to play and that's really what art is at its most I I always go back to this which is the time that I start loving to draw and paint was not an intellectual time it was a time as a child it's like when I Saturday mornings I my mom was very strict about TV but Saturday morning she was sleeping and I could sneak in on a small little black

and white TV I could watch cartoons on Saturday mornings like Space Ghost and Johnny Quest you'll have to some of you are going to have to look all this up and I would take a paper and some markers and I would start to draw what I saw on TV or a copy Dr Seuss or Charles M Schultz's peanuts cartoons and I just loved doing this and it was an innocence and it was but it was a it was an early introduction to the idea of devotion of Devotion to creating to wanting to recreate I loved

lonus and Lucy and Charlie Brown and Snoopy so I drew them as it was like an homage to my love and as you get older as you leave the world of childhood and you especially if you're trying to do this professionally you get people have opinions and what's in style what's not in style what will sell what won't sell what a gallery will say to you what a collector will say what your friends might say and so you have many other thoughts which is being a professional and just like athletes that are playing a sport

that they loved as a kid when they become professional and they're making money it changes the nature and I haven't talked to a lot of professional athletes but I really would that do they often feel that they when they're losing the enjoyment do they have to go back to their childhood to find that love to find a word that is used now to mean something differently but to find the amateur in them and amateur Amore from love the love of doing something not not doing it well doing it for the love not for the prestige

the fame and that's how I was as a child so when I'm painting I try as much as possible to go back to my child self to that little boy that was drawing and painting and making models and even in this demo I don't know if it comes across but there's a point when even though I'm talking to you there's a point where I forget in a way and this tree doesn't become for you but it just becomes for me or the lemon you'll see me do some extra Strokes even now I'm looking at things

that are bothering me that I want to go back into so that is uh the beginnings of a tree and again all with greens that are not made with green and also this is important not made with blue so I've talked about black and yellow to make green and of course like any color like blue and yellow you can make your own greens but in fact although we do use blue and yellow to make our own greens we also buy greens that are pre-made and the reason for that is that it's number one is that

they make a green that maybe we're not using the right blue for or the right yellow for that we love like an emerald green or a tera Verte or it's a specific pigment and the other reason is that when paints are milled they're made in large batches and especially when they're very well milled like the paint I'm about to show you Tusk and pine they make them more beautiful than what you might be able to make on your palette sometimes actually often and that's why I don't just have six colors but why I have multiple

greens and multiple Reds and multiple blues and multiple Earth colors it's because it's that wide variety of paints that are accessible to me to use so when tusen Pine came to me and asked me about colors and what I was interested in I was interested in in a black green and this is they came and they said yes let's let's do it it sounds good to us and so we started working on the first of two tubes which is a it's called Wellington after me John Wellington uh it's called a ver Noir again I mentioned

that before it means green black so it's it's my green black and it's a dark midtone and it's right here and right out of the tube I wanted to design it where right out of the tube it would be usable as a beautiful mixed green especially for painters who are on planer that want a green that sits well that has the spirit the character of older paintings of like a COR an onire cor that he might have been doing in Italy uh this is the tube and I'm going to put some out and I'm going

to put it Center Stage before my demos were on a brown ground uh but right now I'm going to see how this looks on a gray ground oh it's beautiful so it has a lovely opaque feel a opaque is feel and you can see as I take it down uh this brush stroke that I'm doing here is called a scumble and I like to think of a scumble as an opaque glaze because again I talked before about the history of paint through here we can see the history of paint it has a bit of an

olive drab feel but it actually feels SL quite different than an olive drab and take it with medium and we'll see how it thins out W it's beautiful so here you can see this again as a a middle a beautiful middle tone it's very uh very uh soft uh not quite muted actually it has enough character but it's not acidic it it will sit well in the background what am I painting here I think they look like cypresses and of course one day there's going to be the darker version but until then I can darken

this very quickly if I need to get my light world now if I was to do this on a brown and pritur like before we would have a very different green if I was to do it on a blue imprimatur a reddish imprimatur again imprimatur being the a fancy Italian word for the color that you paint your canvas um this we just did the imprimatur with a a neutral I think neutral number six acrylic paint so it D dried very quickly on top of a white canvas and this just again allowed me to work the

darks and the lights at the same time nothing wrong with working a white canvas but you can't go brighter than your white canvas so here you can see how easy and you go well John what if I did want to break the rule of the black with your green and add a blue well let's try some ultramarine blue to this and that's the thing I mean color always gets adjusted and so of course you can adjust these colors but I also wanted something that right out of the tube I can work with let's see let's

get it even darker for this so here it's going to be almost like the next color which will be a dark very blackish green for the shadows and use the Wellington ver Noir as the middle tone notice I'm all my light sources for these demos are going from the same direction it's because I feel the light is coming on me here and this light it's almost feels like the sun I love cypresses there's a great show uh at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that uh just closed it's called van Go's uh cypresses all about his

paintings of cypresses they supposedly have quite a lot of meaning when used in art which I did not know before the show I maybe I had an idea because a painter named Arnold bachan uh had painted what was at one time the most famous painting in all of Europe called Island of the Dead it was so famous in fact that he did five versions four of which still survive one of which is in America at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the other ones I think are in Austria and Germany I think island of the dead

and it's a group of cypresses on an island it's been referenced in films that painting the that versions of that painting I should say and uh if you haven't heard of it and don't know about it it's a lesson and the lesson is not that you'd never heard about it but that what was once famous and that people own prints of eventually tastes change and now we don't know it we know Warhol we know baskot we know Damien Hurst tekashi Mami Jeff Coons taste change and then they change back so maybe now you'll have heard

of it so that's the Wellington verir that's with a little black more black or more blue and now now I I can also lighten it so depending on I'm taking my color and I can lighten it with white which is going to cool it down right white cools white neutralizes so I can see how that looks do I like that coolish color or do I want to make it more vibrant more chromatic in which case I could take a yellow let's take that Wellington the Wellington verir and I can add yellow and I don't know

what the answer is but I know they're the options and that's all painting always is to me it's about options about trying one thing trying another and if you ever hear me talk again about art I will always say one thing about painting and this is so important to me that I used to have it taped on top of my easel I had it there for about 5 years and it was was a sign that said it's just paint and I did this to remind myself that when I thought I was painting terribly or I

was using the wrong color the wrong I was doing the wrong subject or whatever I was critiquing myself over it was to remind me when I looked up there it's just paint enjoy it play if it doesn't work today there's another day and I I have to say that to myself pretty much every day I just don't need the sign now my signs are more like buy new diapers we change our signs dad jokes so again Wellington Green there it is beautiful out of the tube great middle ground great for on PL a sits back

doesn't intentionally have the kick of the cadmium colors doesn't have the acidity the high chroma it recedes it feels like a lot of nature now when you do need the kick you can either mix your greens with higher blues and yellows or you can have those greens the cadmium green but this is for that older way of seeing again to adjust it to make it darker I'm just adding black and if you're thinking oh well why don't I just make black and green of course you can do that like I said before with black uh

with blue and yellow but this color so gets you in the ballpark that this is an easier color to adjust oh it's gorgeous wow when oh you can tell I'm still oh it's lovely see how that would look so this is white white and uh the verir it's beautiful actually going to try and not marry my brush very bad habit when you have one brush in your hand and you try it make try to use that one brush to solve all problems anyway you can just see just playing with this how beautifully it's taken down

this is taken down with black and with white I'm going to finish this by just taking it down with Blues and yellows and the best way to learn about your colors is to have a pad to have a a scrapbook a canvas paper and take color notations take them down with different colors write what they are if in this case for to remember because I don't remember day-to-day things anymore so I would say U Wellington uh ver Noir taken down with lamp black and white and if I was using a specific white I might even

use the brand and so that is I would do that and then I'm going to do one more for today there we go and now let's take it down with yellow I don't even know the names of the yellows I put out I just looked at the color in fact uh often I I will remember a Wellington color but I often don't remember the colors I put out I really look at them more as color than names which is interesting given that I'm very proud to have a color named after me but here I'm going

to take this down now just use all these yellows use them up because it's just paint see how look how different it looks you know almost feel like this is a summer day and this is a misty day or a it's it's changing it's like seasonal as soon as you take different colors and let's bring let's darken it this time instead of with black we'll darken it with blue so this is a more modern palette more cont temporary when I say more contemporary I'm I'm talking about the last 140 years and this is an older

palette so let's take that color and let's take some blue so very different tones and the way you learn to do this I guess you could have someone telling you oh now mix this and mix this but the best way is just to play just play you have if once you have the paints on play and that will help you give you the freedom not just for your answers but to continue playing when you're painting so I was very happy when uh Tusk and pine reached out to me to express interest in my ideas for

colors and the color that first came up with was one that as far as I know didn't exist in other paint lines it wasn't a burnt sienna it wasn't a raw Sienna it wasn't a cadmium red it wasn't it it went back to this idea I had from being an undergraduate in art school or even being in high school when I was told not to use black and the idea was this green that I often love to make which was a black and yellow green uh they were excited about the idea and so I'm honored

to have the Wellington uh verir and tubed I'm going to be I might be honored to have it with my name on it but really what I'm going to be is thrilled to use it and I can't wait till I paint my next trees and yes there's there are trees in New York so I hope that you enjoy this color I hope that this has taught you uh something about color and like anything I teach it's really about being expansive it's not about trying to edit down your information it's just trying to give you more

tools in the toolbx and uh the Wellington uh verir I think is a one more great tool to add thank you so much for joining me today