Color Muze Quarterly: Our View on Hue
One of the things we discuss often during our Color Muze segments on Artistically Speaking Talk Show is how we can make our lives just a little bit easier as decorative painters, faux finishers, muralists, artists, artisans, and “atre-preneurs”. Learning and experiencing more and more about the function, properties, and effects of color can help us in this endeavor, which ultimately will support not only our bottom line, but our ability to offer more effective service to our Clients, as well as enhance our creative efforts. Color know-how is another tool in the kit we can bring to our work, our art, our business, and our Life!
This article is a round-up of sorts, a quarterly review of Color Muze since its debut in May of 2010 on Artistically Speaking Talk Show, powered by Rebecca E. Parsons, creative entrepreneur extraordinaire, and master decorative artist, Lyna Farkas.
In May we discussed ways to add ease to our glazing life!
By keeping base coat and glaze colors close together in hue (color), we can effect easier, smoother blending of the glazes over the base coated surface. This can make any joins, overlaps, or other undesirable drama created by drying glaze edges less visible.
In order to create the sunset sky requested by the Client for their daughter, the ceiling below received five successive application of colorwashed glaze. The base coat is purple, and four of the five glazes are hues of purple, including the almost white clouds, with a fuchsia pink added for intensity. Because all of the glazes were related in hue to each other, as well as to the base coat, they blended easily, and created the sense of depth and airiness desired by the young inhabitant, and an immediate tie-in to the rest of the purple painted room.
Sunset Sky, Purple Style
We talked as well, about using the base coat color itself as one of the glaze colors, which was done in this breakfast room. What could have been a daunting challenge: blending fast-drying latex glaze over a domed ceiling that sloped into wall sections, became a gratifying creative endeavor by tinting clear glaze with the chiffon-colored base coat paint, and using it as one of several glazes blended together with sponges over the surface. Use of the base coat color softened the mix of the other glaze colors, so that the treatment texture and color flows smoothly over the entire surface with no breaks, streaks, or heaviness to mar its subtlety.
Breakfast Room Dome Flow
Perhaps inspired by June’s golden sunlight, we talked about gilding, and how we can make our leafing lives easier by choosing our base coat color with care. Whether we are using “schlag (combination metal leaf), or the real thing (gold), we may be working under time restrictions, material limitations, or other challenges on a site. By choosing a base coat color related to our leaf color, we can camouflage any tears or holidays in the always precious metal leaf we are applying. Here is the original Cross for All Saints Episcopal Church in San Francisco, which was stripped down to its original wood, primed to seal the surface, than base painted in an ochre color, to coordinate with the 22 carat gold leaf applied over it.
Simulating Clay Bole
Clothed in Gold
Ochre , black, and red are some of the colors of “clay bole”, used historically as a surface preparation for gilding, “There are many shades of bole that may be used including ochre, red, black, orange, blue, and green, imparting various tonal affects under the layer of gold leaf. “ — CHARLES DOUGLAS GILDING STUDIO, (Please click for further information on GILDING).
Celestial Gold
July found us Muzing about the Color Wheel, and some of its many applications to the work of the decorative painter. “As the Color Turns” , Color Muze article #1 in Cre8tive Compass Magazine discusses primary, complementary, analogous and “neutral” colors, how we can use them, and why “neutral” may be a relative term! Please read the article here.
In August, we heated up our Muze, with a chat about how to use tints and shades to create highlights and shadows.
A tint of a color is created by adding increments of white to it, and a shade, adding black.
Tints and shades were created from the wall color and used to highlight and shadow a subtle “Mid-Century Retro” design in a guest room.
Tinkertoy? No..."Mid-Century Retro" Style
In the color-saturated logo below, a tint was mixed from the white, red and yellow used in the rest of the painting, while just a pinprick of black was added to both the yellow and the red to create shades of each. Creating even a hint of highlight and shadow can create dimensionality to make your treatment, design, image or mural pop, and add life, and even drama to your walls, ceilings, furniture, and floors!
Top 1 Oil is TOPS
We offered up some advice on how to use color “tactics” in laying out your website’s image thumbnails, in order to catch the eye of visitors and surfers.
In this set of 7 thumbnails introducing decorative treatments on a website, a balanced, yet not symmetrical distribution of hue (the “color of a color”), value (lights to darks), intensity (saturation, or concentration of color), texture, and detail creates a pleasing composition which catches the viewer’s eye without giving away too much about the image as a whole. Create thumbnail images and layouts that entice your site visitors to click to see more. Compose your webpages, like you compose your canvasses, walls, rooms, and everything else you consider Art and Design!
As always, we continued our Muze on the relationship between Color and Light, with the help of Donald Kauffman and Taffy Dahl, creators of Donald Kauffman Color, and their beautiful book: Color and Light: Luminous Atmospheres for Painted Rooms.
Say the authors:
“Glazed walls refract the light—bending each ray as it moves through two different mediums, from the translucent layers to the more opaque undercoat. (Whenever you glaze a wall, if you make the undercoat lighter and warmer then the topcoat, it will create a more luminous effect.)”
What a luscious, luminous world we have as finishers, decorative painters, muralists, artists, artisans and humans, to explore!
Please join our Color Muze exploration on Artistically Speaking Talk Show, and Cre8tive Compass Magazine, “where we honor your passion, and your vision, in this community we are co-creating”– Rebecca E. Parsons
Here’s to a Color Full Journey!
And thanks for visiting…we are all in this thing called Life, together.
A chosen vase provides colorways, pattern, and a touch of whimsy to the wall detailing over a living room fireplace for a creative client’s new home.
Custom stenciled butterflies flutter over the curved wall of the Dress for Success boutique. Architect: Justin Martinkovic of Martinkovic Milford.
Move over Nike “swoosh”, Top 1 Oil‘s in town…and it’s all painted. Interior designer: Kelly Berg of Arte Styling.
Ceilings beg a variety of adornments…painted beams being one of them. Woodworker: Larry McCanse, Palmer Creek Hand-Hewn Wood Products.
Softly blended glaze colors tease out architectural nuances. Interior Designer: Anne Norton-Dingwall: AND Interior Design Studio.
It takes a brave and bold client to live with strong color…a real treat to create with custom tinted, blended glazes.
Glazed stripes layered over a glazed wall create depth and character in The Polished Lounge nail salon.
The high ceiling and walls of a narrow powder room are dramatized by layers of glaze creating visual texture.
Glaze and paint create the effect of marble and stone on a living room fireplace.
Once white latex, these tub cabinets have been transformed into wood…known in the business as “faux bois“, literally “fake wood”.
In the same bathroom, the closet door and cabinetry are also faux bois…inspired by the door to the room, which is “real” wood.
This cabinet sits at the top of a staircase, and serves as a focal point when ascending the stairs, or just passing by and looking up. It’s faux bois application matches that of the staircase banisters.
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