A Journey Through Colour – Part 6. Scenery, inspiration, reading and conclusion

In this post I conclude my series, which has been longer, both in article length and number, than I thought it was going to be, by timing some loose ends. I will consider scenery, inspiration and reading.

Scenery

Colour mixing skills are, of course, applicable when painting scenic items, such as buildings, roads, rivers, etc. Here I differ less from other hobbyists. Scenery usually requires quite a bit of paint, but less precision. Hobby paints for miniatures or models are needlessly expensive for this, and so are artist quality paints. So people typically resort to cheaper paints, including household emulsion – though again with a tendency to use colours that are close to the final result. But mixing seems to be common enough, as is the use of artist-originated colours, such as Naples Yellow. I use student quality paints. These are similar to artist grade pigments, but made with cheaper materials. I’m not sure exactly how they differ. They don’t seem to be as sharp, so it can be harder to create edges; they collapse into pools on the wet palette; I have also seen it suggested that the colours tend not to dry as true as higher grade pigment – in other words the dry colour differs from the wet colour (though I occasionally have this problem with the artist paints); Liquitex paints don’t come in the high quality, long-lasting tubes. Anyway, they are significantly cheaper, especially if you buy them in bigger quantities. I have already mentioned my use of this lower quality paint on bases.

What I haven’t tried yet, though, is to use paint to colour the ground, except in my 6mm bases (with mixed success). I use flocks, and ready-printed fleece battle mats instead. These can have the disadvantage of being a bit bright and saturated. I go for duller battlemats – Geek Villain’s Sicily and Autumn, or Tinywargames’ Arid. I have had quite a big issue with the flock (or grass) on my bases being a bit dark. I have now found some paler products to mix in – I also mix in sand quite often. As I have said before, I find greens quite tricky, so representing swathes of grass in paint is distinctly intimidating. But I often paint buildings, where the browns, dark greys and dull reds are in the comfort zone. The same basic rules apply as for miniatures: mix in plenty of white. Streams and rivers present their own challenge. Many gamers seem happy to revert to primary school bright blue (which, to be fair, is how water can look when reflecting a clear sky). I prefer dull greys, browns and even greens – but I can’t say I have found a winning formula.

Inspiration

I have said that one my aims is to paint miniatures and models so that they look right – a subjective idea – rather than pursuing the false idea of accuracy. That rather leaves the question as to what “right” is. What drives my idea of how things should look? I have already said one thing that doesn’t: Hollywood movies and their saturated colours. Well, not all Hollywood movies – some try to portray some of the gritty reality of war (Saving Private Ryan comes to mind). For World War 2 there are photographs – but the trouble is that almost all of them are black and white. Colourised ones are now more frequent, and though the colour on them is far from reliable, they do convey a feel of colour. But then again both real life colour pictures and colourised ones can have a slightly washed out quality, arising from the photographic process in the former case, or mimicking it in the latter.

Art can be a source of inspiration. This often faces similar challenges to the wargames table – and especially the need to convey a lot of action in a small space. There are some wonderful painters from the 19th Century. There is Vernet – and in particular the quartet of paintings at the National Gallery in London. My favourite is the depiction of Montmirail (above) – but this depicts action in the evening light, so rather a treacherous guide to colour. It remains a beautiful representation of the massed ranks of infantry, though. Another is Lady Butler (otherwise known as Elizabeth Thompson) – I especially love this depiction of a square at Quatre Bras:

Another 19th Century artist I really like is Edouard Detaille:

Modern artists are rarely in the same league as the 19th Century greats (presumably because less subject to the natural selection effect of time…), but you do see some wonderful renderings, but also a bit of a Hollywood tendency. The interesting thing about the pictures I have shown here is that the lighting is muted, which means that the colours don’t aren’t that bright. The red and white stand out only because they are next to very next to very dull colours. Incidentally, if you are representing action in the tropical sun, in Sudan say, then there is a good case for brighter colours. Of course as wargamers our miniatures will be called upon to represent battles in all weathers, so this is bound to be a bit of a compromise.

For WW2 we are reliant on more modern art, if we put aside photos. This one, representing an episode from the 1943 era that is my focus, is one of my favourites, also showing that Tunisia is not just a continuation of the Desert War:

I will be doing well if I evoke these paintings with my miniatures, and scenic representations on the tabletop. But taking control of the colour palette, and toning down the tendency to brightness and saturation, is an important part of it.

Reading

Here are some of the books that have helped me. First is Betty Edwards’s Color. This what it says on the cover – a book that is American and didactic. I am troubled with some of the mangling of the language (I have already sounded off about the use of “tertiary”), and the ultimately I haven’t followed her thinking on light and dark, preferring to focus on saturation instead.But I found it a fantastic introduction – and pushed through the mental breakthrough required to think about colour.

Next comes Lexi Sundell’s The Acrylic Artist’s Guide to Colour. You need to have got through the basics as described by Edwards’s book before you are ready for this. But this gave me the concept of colour wheel, with an interior of complementary mixes, that is part of my mental map. And it talks pigments. There is a wonderful plotting of pigments on the colour wheel (actually by Bruce MacEvoy here). This book led me down rabbit hole of buying bright pigments, but, having put it away years ago, I find myself rereading it.

The next book is a bit of an antidote to the layers of theory pushed forward by the above. I found it in my late aunt’s things – she was a keen amateur artist, especially in watercolour: Michael Wilcox’s Blue and Yellow don’t make Green. This is written from an artist’s perspective and I haven’t followed much of his specific advice (though I have given a second look at Viridian) – it’s about the use of bright pigments, when I have gone down a rather different route. He absolutely hates ready mixes (Payne’s Grey, etc) – you should be mixing your own. The big takeaway for me is that the pigments behave very individually when mixed. If you are interested in colour theory or how artists mix colour, you might find this an interesting read.

Conclusion

I have greatly enjoyed writing this series of articles, even though it feels as if I have rambled a bit. If I had tried to write a magazine article it would have been much sharper, but I would have left so much out. But looking back on it I think the “journey” is the operative word.

I started in the world of ready-mixed paints, with no artistic training. Mixing colours was a question of finding the closest shade, and then trying to tweak it, perhaps with another colour quite close to the result I wanted to achieve. This was often much harder than I thought. In colour mixing two and two don’t necessarily make four – mixing colours creates something duller and darker than the average of the original ingredients.

So my eyes were opened when I finally started to read up on colour theory and how modern artists mix paints. Modern artists tend to base their palette on bright pigments to combat the tendency to dullness. So I rushed out and bought a lot of bright paints. But then I realised that what most modern artists are trying achieve, and what I am trying to do as a wargamer are different. I am composing pictures made up of various shades of dull, and making no artistic statement with a palette tilted to one colour with a particular emotional resonance. No obsession with purple in the natural world, for example (look at a David Hockney landscape). This is bit more like what pre-modern artists were doing, they mainly had to work with duller pigments, reserving brighter, more expensive ones for moments of high impact.

Since the duller pigments, like Raw Sienna or Prussian Blue, are actually a bit brighter than needed in the end result in most cases, it is fine – and easier – to work with these for the most part. I was coming back to where I started (using duller ready-mixed paints) – but with a much smaller basic set of colours (a couple of dozen rather than well over 100). But the basic theory of mixing remains very useful – and especially the use of complements to dull down colours without affecting the hue.

The other big thing I have learnt is the battle against saturation if you want to get a “realistic” feel for colour, especially in smaller scales. I have learned this only slowly though – and much of my Napoleonic collection was built before I had really grasped it. This is where hobby paints tend go wrong, though, to be fair, you can unsaturate a paint by mixing easily enough, but trying to go in the opposite direction is difficult to impossible – so a tendency to saturate is perfectly understandable.

My journey continues. I am still looking for a good way to finish the miniatures with the minimum number of steps. I will continue to experiment with horses. I’m sure I will discover new mixing combinations – and the hobby will take me into new colours to create. But this is all part of the fun.