Intense Red challenge: Can you paint these Nasturtiums? - Live Oil Painting demonstration

Today’s challenge is the intense red of those nasturtiums.

Let me start by telling you that you probably won’t be able to match that colour in paint!

So what do we do? We find out hte value and we get as high chroma as we possibly can in an orangey-red at that value.

It’s a value 5.

So what are your choices?

You’ll need the highest chroma reds you have, If that’s cad red, then go with that.

But if you have Naphthol red, that will get you closer.

You can also get close with quinacridone rose brought up to a value 5 with cad yellow.

I’ll be starting the session today by going through a few mixes for light and shadow colours, to show you how to get as close to the light and shadow colours of these amazing flowers as you can.

Then we’ll paint!

I’m going to be emphasising the abstract design more than strict realism this week.

Materials:
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Surface: 8 × 10 inch Ampersand Gessobord Panel

Medium: Linseed oil and a little solvent

Brushes: Hog bristle filberts for the background and vase, flat synthetics for the flowers.

Paint:

. White - lead preferred, titanium will do it
. Cad yellow
. Your most intense, middle value red. I’ll be using naphthol. Pyrroles are very good too. If all you have is cad red, go with that
. Quinacridone rose, or other high chroma blue-red
. Transparent red oxide (non-negotiable!)
. Green gold
. Phthalo green
. Raw umber
. Ivory black

(I use Michael Harding for all these colours, except lead white, which is from Rublev)

-----------------------------HELPFUL LINKS-----------------------------

The app I use to investigate the colour is called ChromaMagic. You can find it on the Apple and Google Play stores, and there is also a Windows version. It's very inexpensive and extremely useful! If you struggle at all with judging values and colours, or with mixing, this is a great tool to help you calibrate your estimates by giving you immediate feedback on how close your guesses come.

You can get the Munsell value scale - which allows you to translate values from the app directly to your painting - from Paul Centore on Ebay here, also very inexpensive: https://www.ebay.com/itm/223003792036

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