About 10 years ago, after a significant change in my life and with basically no experience with drawing, painting or art in any way at all, I started attending classes with professional artist, Leonie E. Brown. When I say basically no experience, I am talking about literally only being able to draw stick me and colour in colouring books. Talk about going in blind!
A few lessons in (just the very basics really), the class at the time had the awesome opportunity of going on a 5-star weekend getaway at Angala Boutique Hotel for a portrait painting workshop. Here she taught us a special recipe using just four earthy colours being: burnt sienna, burnt umber, payne’s grey, yellow ochre. With just those four colours, one could play with the concepts, dark versus light and warm versus cold. Focusing on blending and adding one concept at time, we were taught to add as per our portrait picture we wanted to paint, blended shades of darks, matching warm (e.g. burnt sienna) and cold (e.g. payne’s grey) darks. Then we would add all the blended shades of white, warm and cold lights by mixing in titanium white, yellow ochre. I was amazed that in no time without much effort a portrait appeared! With this technique one really does not even have to draw the face first exactly in pencil, placing the dark, light, warm and cold in the right places, the picture just magically appears. Exceptional!
To this day, regardless of all the other lessons I had with Leonie after, I absorbed this recipe in every art piece I do. I even use this recipe to lay the ground work or base layer for my more colourful work, as a guide for the warm, cold, dark and light colours. Sometimes, I just use those beautiful colours in my entire work and maybe here and there add another colour to make the piece pop!