I love painting textures, but for many aspiring artists, texture is a stumbling block. When faced with a subject that is defined by texture (hair, stone, etc.), my students sometimes fail at capturing the other elements of art, like value and form. The texture distracts them from those more fundamental elements of art. Texture is an important element of art and useful in a composition, but not at the expense of other elements. So I’ll begin with a brief word of caution – texture should enhance artwork and not take away from light and shadow.

What Kind of Texture are We Talking About?

In terms of painting, texture refers to either the way something looks as if it may feel or to the actual surface of the paint. This article is about the former and not the later, although using brush strokes in relief can also add to the illusion of a subject’s texture.

Problems with Painting Texture

Some problems are fun to solve. Texture is one of those problems. Each texture is unique, requiring a fair measure of creativity to work through.

Painting texture is really about mark-making. The illusion of texture is created through a frequent alternation between light and dark marks.

The marks used to paint a wispy field of grass are different from those used to paint a rocky canyon wall. Each texture is its own painting experience, challenging even with the most practiced artist. The artist must find new ways to make marks for each texture. Some artists vary their hand motions with brushes to achieve the variety of marks needed to differentiate between textures. Other artists find or make painting tools that produce the character of marks they desired.

Most textures are represented through the application of an uncountable number of marks. Painting texture requires patience, time and a keen eye.

Approaches to Texture in Art History

Before the Twentieth Century, artists seem to fall into two general categories regarding texture. Some artists laboriously worked to capture observable textures through the application of many careful brush strokes. During the Northern Renaissance, artists like Albrecht Durer painted textured surfaces one stroke at a time. In Durer’s Self-Portrait, he first painted the hair a general color. Then he worked in layers, alternating between lighter and darker strokes, until finally reaching the desired complexity of texture. No part of the hair is spared from Durer’s relentless rendering of texture.

Contrarily, Caravaggio, an Italian Master from the Baroque period only suggested texture when necessary, instead focusing on form and color to bring his subjects to life. In The Lute Player, Caravaggio uses only a few strokes to suggest the texture of hair. The entire right half of the hair is just a solid color.

Painting A Texture

Unfortunately, there is not a single process used to paint all textures, since each texture is unique. There are, however, some general steps I take to create most textures.

For this article, I’ve selected a corner of bricks as my subject. I’ll share my thought process as I work through this texture.

Painting a Texture – Step One

Scale – Scale, in this case, refers to the size of an artwork. Since textures are often rendered with small marks I like to work larger than life whenever possible. I could never make marks as small as those that I can observe in my subject. By enlarging my subject I’ve enlarged the size of the marks I’ll need to paint as well, giving me a better chance of success.

Step Two

Paint Selection – Like Albrecht Durer’s rendering of hair, I plan to build up several layers of small marks. I prefer to use oil paint. However, the fast drying-time of acrylic paint is advantageous when building up layers of marks. With acrylics, I can paint several layers on a given day instead of having to wait as many as two days between each layer, greatly speeding up my process.

Step Three

Paint Mixing – Variety is a principal of art and a hallmark of texture. I try to show variety in a texture from the first brush stroke onward. When I mix colors for a textured subject, I do not completely mix the paint. This allows for some unplanned, random variance of color.

Step Four

Painting Tools – Brushes may not be the perfect tool for making all marks-types of a certain texture. It is fun and creative to find and make tools specific to certain textures. It almost feels like cheating when I find just the right tool. I often use wads of paper, tissue, foil and cloth. Painting texture with a texture just makes sense. For the bricks, I mostly relied on the textures of broken Styrofoam and crinkled aluminum foil.

Step Five

Speed –  If my marks need a lot of variety I work faster. If I need more uniformity to my marks I work slower. For the bricks, I built up marks quickly, using non-traditional tool. I made marks deliberately but not carefully in an effort to create the random quality of marks that I observed in my subject.

Step Six

Finding Order – After feverishly applying random marks across my canvas, I need to go back to the brush and bring some order to the chaos. In this step, I look for places to clarify the shapes of light and dark. I also identify marks that are not working and paint those marks out.

During this stage, I slow down and focus on the areas where light and shadow meet. These areas reveal the most about a texture.

Step Seven

Color Correction – Sometimes the color gets away from me while I focus on texture. Applying a colored glaze (thinned, transparent color) over my texture will do two things.

First, it gives me a chance to “fix” the color of my subject. Notice that my painting was too cool in terms of its overall temperature. By applying an orange glaze over the entire surface I’ve brought the temperature more in line with my reference photograph.

Second, it unifies my paint marks. Sometimes, the thousands of marks used to build a painting have a feeling of disconnectedness with each mark being separate from the next. A final glaze of color pulls these marks together, giving them a quality of oneness or unity.

Summing It All Up

There are an endless number of methods that we as artists can use to create textures in a painting. Sometimes, creating the right texture for your work requires a little “outside of the box” thinking and some experimentation. Texture boils down to the relationships of values and the marks that you make. How you make these marks and create these relationships of value are where your creative powers come into play. So get creative and start making some texture magic happen in your paintings.

In the late 90s, I got a job matching color. I was a college student at the time – a studio art major. My boss was an oil painter, like myself. With connections in the art-print-industry, he had received a contract to paint copies of a popular artist’s work. These were palette knife paintings. We would create 200 copies, hand-painted on top of Giclée prints. These “enhanced” prints were sold around the country in art galleries and boutiques.

My work week would start with about three hours of color mixing and matching. Using the original painting as a guide, I premixed 15-25 colors in large quantities and saved those colors in metal tins. I would then paint all week, remixing those same colors the next week, until the order had been filled. The colors had to match perfectly from week to week. It was like an oil painting assembly line but the experience I gained was invaluable.

My hope is to share both what I learned then and what I’ve learned since about matching colors below.

Reasons to Match Colors through Mixing

There are several reasons a painter might need or want to mix an exact match.

• To repair a damaged painting.
• To complete an unfinished area from a previous painting session.
• To match colors from an observed subject.
• The subject of a painting has a distinct and familiar color.

Matching Paint to Paint

The first variable to consider when matching a color is the paint itself. For example, tempera and gouache paints dry lighter in value than they appear when wet. This characteristic complicates color matching. When using these paints, I prefer to repaint passages with a fresh mixture over trying to match wet color with dry color. If that’s not possible (in the case of retouching), then expect more trial and error with theses paints. Mix slightly darker values than desired. Wait for test swatches to dry before making adjustments to the mixture.

Dry acrylic and oil paint colors more closely correlate with their wet counterparts so they are less frustrating to match. (I use oil paint in the video below.)

Choosing Pigments

Starting with the right pigments is essential to matching colors through mixing. I like to have as few colors on my palette as possible. Less colors means that I am more likely to remember or even guess what I mixed together in the past to arrive at a certain color. This improves my chances of matching a color.

What works for me is using both warm and cool primary colors. A combination of warm and cool primaries offers enough options to match nearly any color. Using primaries simplifies the process and is a key to becoming a master of color control.

The pigments I recommend are as follows:

• Warm Primaries: Cadmium red medium, Cadmium Yellow Medium and Ultramarine blue
• Cool Primaries: Alizarin Crimson, Chrome Yellow and either Cerulean Blue (for landscapes) OR Phthalo Blue

Besides these primary colors, I keep Titanium white (the whitest white) on my palette. I try to avoid using any black at all.

*PRO TIP – each color added to a mixture results in a duller mixture. If, while attempting to match a color, the mixture becomes markedly duller than the target color, then the mixture is likely a failure and the artist should start over. Attempting to “bring a color back” often results in even greater waste. It is better to waste a little than a lot.

The Color Matching Process

Step to Matching Colors with Paint

1. Identify the hue of a color from the color wheel. Each color is more or less like the 12 colors on the wheel. Even brown and grey colors lean toward a hue. Often browns lean more toward orange or red. Grays sometimes lean toward blue, green or purple. Forcing myself to name the hue that I see gives me a starting point. So if a brown leans toward orange, it is an orange in my mind. Start there.
2. Mix the hue that you see from the primaries, if it is not a primary. Don’t use both the cool and warm options of a single hue in your mixture. That is, don’t use both Cadmium Red and Alizarin Crimson in the same mixture.
3. As required, use white in your mixture to reach the approximate value of the color target.
4. Once the base hue is identified and mixed, use the complement of that hue to manage/reduce the brightness of the mixture until reaching the desired color. The ability to use complementary relationships to control color intensity is the single most important skill to learn as a colorist. Complementary pairs are red/green, blue/orange, yellow/purple.

*PRO TIP – To better judge whether two colors match, those colors need to “touch” one another, whether on the palette or the canvas. Subtle differences are revealed as soon as two colors come together.

Matching the Color of the Subject

Matching a previously mixed color is one thing, but what about matching the color of a subject; a sky, a face, a piece of fruit? The disadvantage in this case, is that the artist cannot always touch their color mixtures to their target colors.

But I have good news – it is the twenty-first century. I believe in taking advantage of technology to advance my painting. Often, I’ll photograph my subject and import it into Photoshop (or another photo editing program).  I’ll then take samples of the certain colors using the eyedropper tool. After printing these swatches, I’m then able to match my colors directly to those swatches (see the demonstration video above).

Sherwin-Williams created an app that does the same thing. The app matches the colors of a photograph to paint colors offered by Sherwin-Williams in an effort to sell their paints. To use this app and others like it with artist’s paint, just take a screenshot of the apps swatches, print the screen shot and start matching color.

The Relativity of Color

Remember, color is relative just like height. I like to stand next to shorter people to make myself look taller (I’m not tall). Similarly, the artist can manipulate a color’s appearance with its surrounding colors. If a color is matched well but looks wrong in the painting, then the problem could be the surrounding colors.

The Secret Weapon of Color Matching – Shhh!

Some opaque paints, like oils and acrylics, offer an opportunity for color correction even after the colors have dried. The technique for doing so is called glazing.

A glaze is a thinned down, transparent solution that acts as a filter over a painting. You can brighten a color by glazing over it with it’s own hue or dull a color by glazing over it with its complementary hue.

Conclusion

Color is like icing on a cake. It may add to the painting, but without it you still have a cake. Value is the cake. Without it you have nothing. So take some pressure off of yourself when it comes to color matching. Get your colors close but your values perfect.