On Drawing and Painting (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SET-PALETTES Given a palette with a sufficient variety of pigments set out upon it and the possibility of producing all the tones represented in the Diagram of the Triangles, we are presumably ready to take up the practice of painting and in connection with it the problems of Design and of Representation. What more can we require than a palette which will give us all possible tones; every color in every value and every color in varying degrees of intensity or of neutralization? Nothing more than that can be required, certainly. The question is whether something less than that will not serve the purpose, as well if not better. So wide a range of tones may be more embarrassing than helpful. With a palette of infinite possibilities, the selection of particular tones for particular purposes becomes very difficult and definite thinking in tone-relations impossible. It is only when we have very much reduced the possibilities of the palette that we can think definitely in tone-relations and are able to decide without hesitation what tone to use in any particular case. A palette of infinite possibilities is unnecessary and undesirable. I propose, now, to describe a number of limited set-palettes which will serve the painter well, I am sure, and help him over many difficulties. I have indicated on pages 45-46 a series of such palettes; palettes of twenty-one tones with White and Black. We have in these palettes the three elementary colors, Red, Yellow and Blue, repeated in seven planes or registers of light, a register for each value of the Scale of Values. In each palette the three colors are repeated in a certain order and as the order of three colors admits of six differences we get six palettes from which we may choose the one best suited to our purpose. In the registers of Pa...