Yellow - The Color of Happiness

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Banana, Grapefruit, Pepper Temperature Exercise in Oil

We are exploring “the color of happiness”—yellow, to understand some of the interesting color temperature mixes necessary to paint the three objects above. Because we often work out of a limited split primary palette, our tubes of primary red, blue or yellow might not be the temperature that is needed at the moment. We needed, in this case, to cross-mix Cadmium Yellow Light with a bit of Cadmium Yellow Medium to get a good neutral-temperature yellow to begin with, in essence pre-mixing our initial primary yellow.

One wouldn’t think that painting a banana presents any mixing challenges at all, but this just-ripe banana had five distinct temperature changes on it—from green-tinted yellow, to a yellow-tinted green, to a pure neutral yellow with white, a slightly warmer yellow which had some Cadmium Yellow Medium mixed in and finally, for the shadow, another green-yellow made from a bit of Ivory Black and Cadmium Yel…