If you were born with a good colour sense, or by work and diligence acquired one, it will be as nought if you can’t draw. Let me stress at once the importance of sound draughtsmanship as a base on which to build tone, colour, design and so on.

You will not be able to put down your ideas in a masterly manner if you cannot draw and your inability to render your ideas clearly in paint will make for frustration and disappointment. Artistic thinking, which comes from personal observation and study, will flourish more satisfactorily if this very important, almost vital, part of picture-making is faced.

So colour, and its controls, will be prevented from being used fully if care is not taken of the structures and forms on which it is to be placed. Drawing for a painting can be in pencil, charcoal or paint itself and should mean a careful and tidy statement, without too much overworking or elaboration, of the shapes and planes the colour will be placed on. With well-stated areas, boundaries and proportions, much more coherence will be assured in the first underpainting, or if it is a direct, one-go sketch, tendencies to slip, slide or become nebulous, will diminish.

Colour is one thing; colour harmony is another. Colour, as far as the artist is concerned, is the paint from the tube.

Colour harmony is the thoughtful and contrived mixing of the colours so that they not only interpret nature as you wish, but live happily together without harshness.

If you put side by side, straight from the tube, cobalt blue, vermilion, emerald green and chrome yellow, you would have colour. But harmony would be a long way off. Do this as an experiment. Then try adding a little white and a little yellow ochre to each one. Whilst it will not make a perfect harmony it will rob the original colours of their harshness to a certain extent and begin to tame them.

Generally speaking, a colour is often improved, especially in its shadows, by the addition of a little of its complementary mixed with it; green and red, violet and yellow and orange and blue. And, of course, the other way round. And remember that by adding white to a colour you only make it lighter – not brighter. And by adding black you do not automatically get a darker shade of the same colour that will be pleasant.

The great thing to realise is that the subject you choose will probably not be a completely happy combination of hues. Therefore you must try and make it one. Before you even pick up a brush make a mental note of the clashes or “odd man out” colours, so that they may be replaced or toned down to fit into the general scheme.

The power of retention and selection is yours, remember. Look at first class examples of all schools of painting thorough the ages and imagine what would have happened had not the artists selected their tonal and colour schemes carefully. Find some colour prints by, say, Constable, Gainsborough, Whistler, Degas, Van Gogh and Stanley Spencer; cut out little bits of colour paper in basic colours such as bright red, green , yellow, blue, mauve and black (no doubt food and detergent wrappings and packages will supply these).

Now take a print and place the colours on their nearest counterparts – blue paper on the sky, green on the trees or red on the flowers and so on. You will soon see by the comparisons that what the geniuses of the advertising world call “colour” is crude in the extreme when compared with the refined treatment by a good creative artist.

I suppose more licence would be allowable in abstracts, but even there you will probably find no unpleasant clashes in the best work.

Much bad colour arises, of course, through faulty tone values. Colour and tone although different in definition, are really interdependent. But I am sure most untasteful colour arises from sheer thoughtlessness or preconceived ideas of what is expected. Literal renderings must be ignored; if you are inclined to copy green trees, blue sky, red roofs, pink faces, just like that, you don’t fully appreciate your own power to create beauty. You should set about reorganising your colour ideas.

The thin, simple underpainting I advocated in last month’s article will go a long way towards easier colour control, as you are not only less likely to commit yourself with crude tints, but you will be able to have more chance of arrangement and selection at a slower pace.

Then again, the advantages of a toned ground will be noticeable. At the beginning it will tend to show through the newly placed paint a little and bind together the areas left untouched. Of course, in advanced painting deliberate advantage can be taken of ground colour, and the colour of one’s choice used. Cool subjects can often be more effective on a warm ground and warm subjects on a cool ground – not hot vermilion or cold black and white grey, but very ochrey greys. I suggest shades of warm and cool greys because grey is the great linking and binding colour. Have you ever noticed how many variously-coloure3d objects can all look so much better against a grey wall – flowers, people, furniture, pictures? Here you can experiment by placing pieces of coloured paper on a grey ground and afterwards on a white or cream ground. I think you will see what I mean.

The more limited your palette the more likely you are to achieve harmony because you will be forced to make more shades with fewer colours. See how near you can get to some landscape subject using only cobalt, light red, yellow ochre and white. It will force restraint on you. It will put the brake on using bright green and bright yellow. You will be surprised how close you can get to nature with the four colours I have suggested. It will teach you to employ other colours very sparsely and only when you find your basics can’t quite make it.

Unless it is for an object of bright red, you will find that the many variations achieved by mixing light red, yellow ochre and white will cover most warm shades from pale pink, through ochres and oranges, to warm dark red. Blue and yellow ochre will deal with a wide range of blues and greens.

For a portrait though, you would have to try burnt sienna yellow ochre, viridian and white; or rose madder, Naples yellow, terre verte and white. There are several combinations for average flesh painting that will produce good colour. You will find a preference. Broadly speaking the light parts of a face or figure can be matched by mixing one of the warm colours into white and cooling it off a bit with a small touch of green. The degree of tonal depth or shade of colour will be decided by you. But if you think the white man is really white hold a piece of white paper against its lightest tone. You will find him quite a way down the scale and it should be a warning against falsely high tone values. For the parts of the human form turning away from the light into dark, mixtures of the four colours chosen will be capable of giving the illusion of reality, especially the greater use of the darker colours on the shade side. There’s no getting away from the fact that you’ve got to try and find a solution by mixing. After all, there’s no such thing as a “side-of-nose-in-shadow colour” to be bought from the paint manufacturers in one tube.

So find a good formula and stick to it for a while, keeping at the back of your mind, at the same time, ideas for slowly altering, broadening and improving your method. If you stick to a formula too long there will be no real progress or adventure.

See that you are cautious of black and blue in flesh painting. I am not saying that there aren’t occasions when a little of these two might help, especially if any suggestion of grey is needed. If you tried to darken your colours by adding black, though, you would only turn your reds brown, your greens bottle-green and your yellow ochre a dull shade more suitable for landscape.

It will often help to look closely at as many good examples by experts as you can, preferably originals, in order to try and find solutions for the rendering of paint and colour, handling and treatment. And if you think it would help, actually copy and portions of master paintings from good clear reproductions. As far as learning is concerned, I always think one brush stroke is worth a thousand words.

When I was a student at the Royal Academy Schools, way back in the days when a good sable brush was 5d, we had to spend one day a week copying Old Masters in one of the National collections as part of our training. Whilst it is true that the artist had done all the work for us and solved all the creative problems, so to speak, it did give us practical help in the manner of tackling things, providing we didn’t bore ourselves by niggling, but tried to make a broad, intelligent interpretation. At times one could feel that what the artist had felt and it was a temporary release from being continually thwarted from our own experience.

Avoid obvious colour at all costs. Apart from the fact that it can be crude and distasteful you will soon tire of it, as one tires of the obvious in all things. If you are still in doubt as to what obvious colour is you will find it in profusion in the toy shops, travel brochures, gardening catalogues and the more cheap and revolting colour prints for the bottom end of the reproduction market.

The better things in life are often an acquired taste, but much more satisfying in the long run. So it is with good colour. And, once you have acquired it, like a certain famous motor car, you will never again be content with anything else.

Taken from the May 1969 issue of The Artist