Candace Whittemore Lovely

Color with Candace Whittemore Lovely Nantucket

If you'd like to know the French Impressionist's magic and secrets of color, then this book is for you, no matter what age you are. The French Impressionists, inspired first by Eugene Chevrel's scientific research and later Ogden Rood color theories (1879) studied color as light by challenging themselves to paint from life as fast as the sun could rise, yet have as much realism as the new photograph. By quickly starting their plein aire paintings in values of blue paint and then adding hues and chroma with red and yellow paint they could achieve realism on canvas, directly from life, before the sun changed. I practice this theory today and I'm sharing it with you with my original oil paintings of Nantucket Island. Each Nantucket painting is in values, "the relative lightness or darkness of a color" of primary blue. Since form is made where the highlight meets the shadow, you can see the subject immediately. The challenge now rests with you to color hues with values and chroma. Magic will happen when you color over the blue painting with the other 2 primary pigment colors, yellow and red. Secondary colors like green are made by adding yellow to blue. Or purple is created by combining primary red with primary blue. Orange is made from yellow and red. chroma, or the intensity, is made by adding the opposite or complementary color. To make brown; mix red with its complementary hue, green. While coloring, you will see the rules of nature, light and color as explained, pop before your eyes, recreating my paintings by just using blue, red and yellow crayons.