Hi Beth,

I wish! (On both counts...Daniel Greene being here, as well as having studied under him!) I haven't found a great deal on him online, although he is prolifically published. Here are a couple of place to get started: http://www.johnpence.com/visuals/painters/greene/
http://www.portraitartist.com/halloffame/greene.htm

Try to get a hold of his Video, "Erica". It will inspire you! Daniel Greene's Book,"Pastel" is out of print, but check here, anyway: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...21546?v=glance

Daniel Greene's wife, Wendy Caporale, has a recently published book, "Painting Children's Portraits in Pastel" , which you would probably also enjoy a great deal. http://www.portraitartist.com/bookst...raitpastel.htm

The color numbers on pastel sticks make me get a twitch in my eye. The easiest way, I think, to determine their temperature is to test them one next to the other. Temperature is ALWAYS relative, so you would want to know, for example if a color you have picked up is warmer or cooler than the color you just put down. In any case temperature needs to work in the context of the painting you have at hand. When you test them, it needs to be done on SAME paper you are painting on, otherwise you won't be able to judge properly. When I am finished with a pastel, there are always 40 or 50 little test marks along one edge (to be blessedly covered with the mat board).

Thanks Chris... having trouble typing since I have a surgical glove on...LOL.http://forum.portraitartist.com/show...0&pagenumber=5

I do have Wendy's book, had no idea they were married. I think her book is good, but pat you on the back, your's is the best.

I do make my little marks, and try and start with a palette on the actual paper, it always ends up changing, then I have all these pastels I never use, so I thought if there was a trick it might be easier to use those provided than creating mixed color. But it sounds like the rule of thumb here is to just learn by doing.

As my favorite quote in your book, by one of your teachers or you, can't remember (para-phrasing here)....." doesn't matter how many classes you take or who teaches you, you have to draw everday!"

Thanks Beth,

Harley Brown: "You have to draw every day just to keep from getting worse!"

Elizabeth had a question in one of her earlier posts in this thread that I was wondering about too. How does having one of these color wheels help you as a tool? What exactly do you do with them?

A little riddle for you all as a way of explaining how color theory helps an artist:

Go to your studio and mix a:

Value-6
Hue-Yellow Red
Chroma-Medium(8)

What color have you mixed?

I did my color wheel as one of my beginning exercises as an artist. It really helps you to understand and classify color. With a good systme like Munsell, you can mix any color with just three notations - like the notations I give above.

No fair if you have read on the other forum and already know what color this is.

Michele,

I use the Analogous color wheel most often now to make decisions about dominant color in an analogous scheme. When I first began I used is as an"Analogous Color Guide for Dummies"; dial in your dominant color. If you don't see, don't use it.

Incidentally, the back cover of the Analogous wheel contains a Munsell wheel.

I use my Steven Quiller color wheel most often to check relative color temperatures, and to mix earth colors (since I don't have them on my palette).

Michael,

Just a note to support your use of objective nomenclature (perhaps this should be a separate thread under "Tips"). I think we should all use descriptors like this, instead of nebulous terms like "sky blue" (!?) or "leaf green". I encourage readers of my book to think color-value-saturation, although I think it is even more useful to describe saturation as a number on a scale, rather than "fully saturated, slightly desaturated", or "extremely desaturated", as I have done to date.

Could you desribe your chroma scale, please?

Michael, your riddle sounds like Burnt Sienna.

Chroma is the relative purity or grayness of a color - tan for instance is a fairly low chroma where as cad orange is a very high chroma. As chroma of a color increases, the color comes closer to its pure hue.

Munsell ascribes a 14 step chroma scale which I use, but I have found it even more useful to group chroma into three categories of High, Medium, and Low. I even created some color charts with each hue expressed in nine values and each value expressed in high, medium, and low chroma. I mixed each value of the hue with 25% gray, 50% gray, and 75% gray - the grays each corresponding in value with the value of the hue - i.e., I mixed a value 6 gray into the value 6 hue to express the muted chroma of the hue at that value.

Does that help?

Michele: Burnt Sienna is about a value 3 to 4. Value 6 will be lighter. I made this color by starting with pure cad orange (value 6-7) and decreasing its chroma with a value 6 gray and tinting it with just a bit of yellow ochre (value 7) to hit the right color. Perhaps I should have described the hue as closer to Yellow-Yellow-Red.

It may be a bit hard for folks to get the exact color, but everyone who understands hue, value, and chroma will come quite close. The important thing is that we now have a grammar or language we can use to talk about color that we can all understand. Further, I can look at a color and say - "hey, that is a purple-blue hue, about a value 8, and pretty pure in chroma" when I look at a blue sky out my window, or the sky from an old master painting, or a photo I took. It takes a lot of the guessing about color out of the equation and gives the artist a solid spot to begin.

Michael, if a value 6 is lighter than a 3 to 4 you must be working with a scale that is opposite the one that I use to teach my students.

I use a value scale where 1 is white and 9 is black.

Michele:

The Munsell value scale is indeed the opposite of that - value 1 is dark and value 9 is light with black and white bracketing them.