Triadic color schemes use three evenly spaced colors on the color wheel.
A BEGINNERS COMPLETE GUIDE TO THE PRIMARY COLOURS – PART 2 – BLUE
Welcome once again to Emily McCormack-Artist’s blog on all things Oil Painting.
This month and next we are looking at the Primary Colours. So, in Part 1 we looked at the colour Red, in this week’s blog we are looking at the colour Blue. *
- WHAT DOES THE COLOUR BLUE REPRESENT?
- ARTISTS WHO USED THE COLOUR BLUE
- AS A BEGINNER OIL PAINTER – WHAT BLUES SHOULD YOU BUY?
- MORE ON THE COLOUR BLUE
WHAT DOES THE COLOUR BLUE REPRESENT?
Blue is meant to represent trust, loyalty, wisdom, intelligence, truth, and heaven.
But there seems to be a difference between what the shades of blue represent, for example: –
- light blue is associated with healing and tranquillity; whereas
- dark blueis associated with power, seriousness, and knowledge.
Blue is often used to promote products associated with cleanliness, water, air, sea and precision / ‘high tech’ products. But is rarely used for food products as it is thought to suppress the appetite. (Colour Wheel Pro, 2015)
ARTISTS WHO USED THE COLOUR BLUE
If you have attended the oil painting workshops here at the studio, you will have completed a section on working with the primary colours including blue. In these workshops, we study works by Munch, Degas and Sorolla to name a few, and use the full range of blues as listed in the above infographic ‘The Shades of Blue – What Are They?’.
If you have been following me, on my own art journey @emilymccormack-artist, you will have seen that I use a full spectrum of blues including turquoises (not included in the infographic above).
Lately, I have limited the blues to just one or two. However, I have expanded the range of its complement colour – ORANGE (being the opposite colour to blue on the colour wheel) – to include sienna’s, umber’s, transparent oxides and oranges.
For those who are only tuning in here now, below is a sample of some of my work using the colour and shades of blue: –
Other artists who used the colour blue include Van Gogh, the Blue Riders, Matisse, Hokusai, along with:
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 – 1919)
Renoir painted the Umbrellas twice – once in 1880-1 and again in 1885.
In this painting, he used cobalt blue for the right side, but later used the new synthetic ultramarine blue introduced in the 1870’s, when he added the two figures to the left of the painting a few years later. (Bromford, Kerby, Leighton, Roy, 1991)
We are lucky enough to have one of these paintings in the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.
Claude Monet (1840 – 1926)
The Gare Saint – Lazare is one of twelve views of this station painted by Monet in 1877 (Bromford, Kerby, Leighton, Roy, 1991). He used several recently invented colours including cobalt blue, cerulean blue, and French ultramarine. (Wikipedia, 2021)
Pablo Picasso (1881 -1973)
During his Blue Period (1901–1904) Pablo Picasso used blue and blue-green, with hardly any warm colours, to create a melancholy mood.
‘his Blue period works seemed to reflect his experience of relative poverty and instability, depicting beggars, street urchins, the old and frail and the blind…
…and the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagema’s who took his life at the LHippodrome Café in Paris France by shooting himself in the right temple in February 17, 1901.’
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