Hello again! I hope your week is going well! A couple weeks back I let you in on the secret that I don’t use black paint in my paintings. Well I’m here this week to give you a short story on how I don’t use black paint:
The palette is lined with various piles of colors. The time has come in the painting process to push some areas into the background. It is time for black.
My brush swipes a big dab of deep, dark, and rich Pthalo Blue from the top of the palette and places it at the bottom right corner. Without hesitation, an equal amount of the beautifully dark and almost greenish brown Raw Umber is scooped up with my brush and placed in the same vicinity as the blue. Both colors are showing me how dark they can be on their own. But what if forces were joined? Could it be a black that is blacker than black?
Round and round my brush slowly pulls these colors together into a new hue. A quick, small visit to Cadmium Red brings in a subtle amount of warmth and the hue is finalized.
The resulting color is chromatic. It brings in elements of all the rainbow. This is my black.