And they're all pretty similar:
Titanium Buff
Naples Yellow
Flesh Tint
Titanium Buff is cool and greenish, Naples Yellow is warmer and more yellow, while Flesh Tint is a pale pink. Using them to lighten landscape greens means you can get the light tone you need, along with the correct colour temperature, without resorting to white.
They provide a useful short cut, in other words. I started using them to hit the right notes in landscape greens back in the spring, painting March fields in cool, rainy weather.
Painting out of doors at that time of year meant I had to find a way to paint bare trees, a technical problem I'd always balked at before. I did some woeful winter landscapes last year, but since then I managed to find a way to paint bare branches en masse that looks half way convincing. As ever, the best way is to work from large masses to small, adding only as much detail as will suggest more than is really there. Masses of bare twigs can be suggested by fuzzy edged paint scrubbed into the darker wet paint used for the mass of branches. Edges and sky holes do most of the work.
Painting in the open air makes a huge difference. I find I'm relying much less on photography these days, though I still take reference shots before I start painting. I find that working from life - even when the weather changes between painting sessions - gives me far more to work with, and even if I manage to ruin the painting on site, I can rescue it in the studio. When you work from life, your visual memory is more engaged, and you bring things back to the studio in your head, as well as on board or canvas.
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| Oak in a field, March. |
