Chapter 12 - The Yellow & Oranges

By Panos Charalampakis

CHAPTER 12
The Yellows & Oranges

Above:
Yet another Franzoia Serge’s masterpiece of the Swedish banner series. Now an example of yellow.

Yellow is the third and last primary color. Added to blue produces green, added to red produces orange. It’s a warm color with purple violet as its complimentary hue. Cadmium yellow series has brilliant, rich chroma while lemon yellow has less chroma, being a little cooler tone. Yellow can be shadowed with orange hues, or brown hues for darker results. But, anything is permitted. Try blue, purple green, anything is possible and no one can say its not correct. If the result is what you re after and it pleases you then why not. I usually use white for highlights or a lighter tone of yellow than the base and using white only for highest highlights. Cadmium yellow replaced. chromium yellow since the latter is poisonous due to zinc content and it has great tinting and covering power making it very useful as for basic painting and for glazes. Remember that its brilliant thought, so if you want to cut its power a bit add small amount of white to decrease its chroma.

Although ochre family doesn’t really belongs here, I will mention about it in this chapter. There are a lot of useful ochres available out there. I like yellow ochre, which contains a bit of black and green even if it’s not obvious, golden ochre and brown ochre. Some people call them earthen yellows. Shading can be done with brows for shadows and napples yellow light or white for highlights. More about these colors in the chapter dealing with replicating metals.

Orange is the result of red and yellow mix. It’s not a difficult color to paint and shade convincely. It has the same properties of the parent colors, so by using opaque parent colors, the orange will be opaque. And same applies for transparent hues. Cadmium orange is the most common hue available. An all time and purpose color. Amber is a light orange also widely used. Orange can be shaded with reds and browns and highlighted with lighter tones of the same color, yellows and white for the maximum highlights.

Above:

An excellent example of yellows and oranges both on same subject painted by Amalia Retuerto.