Is White a Color Killer?
featuring Bill Anton
Bill likes to think that white can certainly be a color killer in the wrong hands. You have to be very careful and know a lot about it before you begin to handle it. White tends to, with a beginner, get into all the mixtures and sap the strength and the color out of the mixtures. Everything can easily start to look chalky if it gets into everything. One practical thing is: make sure you keep your brushes clean. If you have a glob of white on a brush be sure you thoroughly clean it.
“You have to be judicious with white. It can be very lethal with the earth tones. ”
One of the reasons it becomes problematic is because we are trying to get our paintings nice light and bright (so we easily turn to white). One way of achieving this without the use of white is to work transparently. And, to let that raw canvas almost act as a white. This way, you can almost stain the painting with a high mixture of mineral spirits or whatever you are using and put a thin layer of color on (this is particularly effective with darks). The use of transparent color will key everything up without the use of white. You have to be judicious with white. It can be very lethal with the earth tones. Bill believes it is really just trial and error and having the guts to self-evaluate. Be honest with yourself when it comes to what you need to address and work on.
When Bill works from life painting horses, he wants his outdoor paintings to be very high-key and look like sunlight on the horse hide. Bill’s painting partner would scrub the foreground that the horse was standing on with very transparent ochre. If that was too strong, he would cut it with a little burnt sienna. It would almost be a stained foreground. That gives you a good idea of how high the value is of, say a horse, standing on sand. You can key your entire painting off it without using white at all. If you were to mix white and burnt sienna, unless you mixed it in the exact right proportions, it could really become dead, dull, and chalky. This is the killer!
Listen to Gabor and Bill on the Paint & Clay Podcast here.