If you have ever been a student of watercolor, I have a feeling you've been told one time or another not to use the color black. I had been told this by many of my teachers at the American Academy of Art.
For the longest time when I was out of school I never would use black watercolor or white as a matter of fact, but the use of white I will
have to talk about in another newsletter, today I want to talk about using black.
After taking 3 years of watercolor classes with Irving Shapiro at the American Acdemy of Art it was engrained in me to never use black, but instead mix you blacks so they appear to be more colorful blacks. I believe that with all my heart until I took a workshop in Port Clyde, Maine with artist and friend Robert Wade. One day I skipped class and drove into Rockland, Maine where there is a
Wyeth Museum. What I witnessed that day was the watercolor I have pictured above (Blueberries in the Grass). I saw this painting and it blew me away. It was this painting that changed my watercolor life forever. Andrew Wyeth used solid black in many of the paintings I saw that day at the museum and in this particular painting of the blueberries in the grass it just made the blueberries and the basket they were in glow. Never before that had I ever seen the use of black be so effective. From that
point on I thought to myself if Andrew Wyeth a master can use black then I will too.
When I first started teaching in 1983 I would teach the same way as my mentors taught me and that was to tell students not to use black. Then after that day at the Wyeth Museum I went on a search to figure out why was it so important to teach students not to use black... I wanted to be able to exlain to my students why they shouldn't use black. The answer I came up with after years of
teaching was students shouldn't use black because they tend to over use it. Students would use it to make their light colors darker and they would use black every time they needed a dark no matter what other colors were in the darks, which in turn would make their paintings very monochromatic and dull. Another thing that would help the student when I would tell them they were not allowed to use black was it helped them learn how to mix rich and colorful darks.
I now
allow students to have black on their palettes along with white and a load of colors that are somewhat opaque. I will have to write about those other colors in future newsletters. I now teach students to mix colorful blacks along with how to mix colors into a black. Sometimes it's great to break the rules!
Go ahead and break some watercolor rules you may become the next Andrew Wyeth!
