Introduction
We’ve all seen them — those exquisite paintjobs that are ablaze with a luminosity and glow that just seem to radiate from within. They’re “lit up” with color and it’s glorious! What’s more, they have a “cleanliness” to their colors, a clarity that furthers the overall impression so beautifully and makes the piece really stand out as only great paintwork can do. They also have a depth, a richness that draws you in, enticing your eye and inspiring your senses. These pieces own their space, don’t they? They snatch your heart and hold it, capturing your imagination and wowing you with their singular beauty. And this effect can be made to be so subtle and sublime, too, it doesn’t have to be “in your face,” existing on a spectrum of possibility. Indeed, even the darkest black bay or most monochromatic chestnut can be made to glow with smart color strategy!
Even more though, these pieces also seem more realistic because they better match life’s coloration and the impression of a healthy “clear” coat. The artist just seemed to be able to target those authentic colors so closely that our brain suspends disbelief and for a moment, becomes convinced we’re looking at a real horse.
So how do these artists do this? How do they create paintwork that “pops” so beautifully while still remaining realistic? How do they achieve that glow without looking like carnival paint? What do they do to inject luminosity and cleanliness into the pigments without looking day-glo? Welp, it’s all in the colors you choose to use in your mixes and a keen understanding of color theory! That’s the trick, in a nutshell! So to learn how we, too, can create such splendid paintjobs, let’s talk about this powerful approach to kick our own work up a notch or two! Let’s go!…
Put White To Sleep
It’s an easy assumption: Just use white to lighten a pigment. This is called “tinting,” adding white to a color to lighten its value. However, when it comes to horse color, this is often exactly the wrong way to lighten many horse colors like bay, chestnut, black, and other clear coats. Why? Because the use of too much white in these colors creates an over-tinted, “powder puff” effect that sucks all the glow and luminosity out of the paintwork. Unless you use it very carefully then, white is the luminosity-killer so if the color you’re painting isn’t white-based, veer from white to lighten it. Examples of white-based coats are many dilutes and dapple grey. Why are they white-based? Because whites are usually needed to provide some body, some “opacity oomph,” to a “parent” transparent color. For example, for silver dapple, we often use Raw Umber and Burnt Umber and blacks as the parent colors, but we need a touch of white to add opacity to them since they tend to be so transparent out of the tube. Grulla is another example of a white-based color only because the parent colors you generally use — Raw Umber and Burnt Umber and blacks — are so transparent. Pearl, champagne, isabella, and others are also examples of white-based colors for this reason. So in these white-based colors, you can use whites to lighten your colors, albeit strategically and carefully to avoid a powder puff effect.
But just as much, too much white can over-cool a color which can veer it away from what your reference is telling you to do. You can use a warm white such as Antique White, or make one yourself by adding a gold or brown, but just be careful that the warming agent doesn’t also cause you to veer away from what your reference requires. Indeed, in this way, tinting can be tricky business! Infusing white into your pigments is always a delicate balancing act. So overall, use white just enough to add opacity oomph to your transparent pigments and if you go beyond that to add a highlight, be tactical and cautious. We don’t want to cool things down too much or lighten things too much beyond our reference, or powder-puff our paintjob into stylization.
Now as for the clear coats, they’re often a different story! We’ll get to them in a bit, but suffice to say, surprisingly, you can use white to add that opacity oomph to them, too, since many of those parent colors are transparent as well. But be conservative here — use just enough white to add opacity to the pigments and no more or you’ll end up with a powder-puff bay or chestnut or black. But this is often how you achieve those creamy chestnuts and bays, adding some sort of tinting pigment to your parent colors. You can also add a bit of “pop” to a black this way by giving your black shading a “place to go” if you start with a charcoal instead of a straight black. And it doesn’t have to be white per se — it could be a grey, taupe, unbleached titanium, buff, etc. Just something with white in it.
Point being, don’t automatically reach for the white when you want to lighten a pigment. White definitely has its place and it’s a powerful partner for your paintwork, absolutely, but it needs to be wielded with a keen understanding of color theory. Generally speaking then, white is better used as an opacity-enhancer and tinting-agent rather than as a go-to for adding highlights or glow, especially on those clear coats. There are other colors that do a better job at that while avoiding the powder-puff effect, which we’ll discuss in a mo’.
Give Black A Nap
Likes whites, blacks have their place on our palette, too. Indeed, they can be essential for certain colors such as dapple greys, buckskins, grullas, and bays, for example. But the trick with straight black is this: It kills color. It doesn’t just darken them…it kills them. What does that mean? Well, it erases their luminosity, saturation, and glow, and it can muddy up a color faster than just about anything. It just kills the nature of a color outright. And it’s powerful stuff — just a dab can kill in a heartbeat. So use blacks with tremendous caution and only with certain colors if you’re wanting to darken a color. Why’s that? Because blacks can also shift colors towards green or blue since many blacks are biased in that direction. Like try to mix Ivory Black with a yellow and you get a greenish mud, definitely not what you want for your golden, glowing palomino or rich, dusty buckskin! Indeed, it’s why that transition between the black leg and the buckskin body can turn green in inexperienced hands.
Different blacks also have different properties. For instance, Ivory Black is very transparent and has a blue base whereas Mars Black is more opaque and has a brown base (it’s also very powerful in a mix). Likewise Bone Black is a more opaque, very warm black that’s brown-based (being made from the charred bones of animals) while Lamp Black is more transparent and cool blue toned (it was originally made by collecting the soot from oil lamps). Then there's the cool Perylene Black with a very strong green base and, finally, Carbon Black (formed by the partial combustion of natural gas) which is the most opaque, strongest black and is probably the most neutral black out there. So with this in mind, not every black is the ideal one for your mix, depending on your colors. Like you don’t want to mix blue blacks with yellows or you’ll get greens, for instance.
But if we want more control in our black use, what do we do? Well, we use color theory to learn how to make our own black, something we can have more control over. Really, if we can make our own blacks, we can shift it easier in any direction so it jives well with our mixes. So how do we make blacks? Easy! A common way to make a black is to mix a dark cool blue like Ultramarine Blue with a warm brown like Burnt Umber. This creates a rich, deep black that allows us to adjust the temperature as needed. Other options are Prussian Blue and Burnt Sienna or Red Oxide or Alizarin Crimson or Terra Rosa or Burnt Umber again. In essence, you mix a deep blue with a reddish brown and boom…you have a black you can adjust. But also try blues with Raw Umber for a very different type of useful black that comes in handy in certain situations. Another common way to make a black, a more neutral, natural one, is to mix your primary colors — red, yellow, and blue — together (not in equal portions, mind you, go easy on the yellow). For a more novel way though, try Phthalo Green and Quinacridone Violet or Alizarin Crimson.
So the takeaway here is this: Don’t necessarily reach for blacks if you wish to darken your colors as it can kill those colors or shift them well away from your intentions. But if you do reach for them, know the properties of the black you reach for when considering your mix. What’s more, learn how to mix your own blacks for maximum adaptability that’ll really help your palette enrich and glow up.
Wake Up, Pigment! Breakfast Is Ready!
So if white and black aren’t always the best answers to our problem, what do we do instead? In other words and right to the point, how do we brighten our browns without white and how do we darken them without black? And that’s the $64 question right there so let’s get right to it!
Let’s say you’re painting a chestnut, or a palomino, or a bay. How do we wake up those colors without using white? Well, we use primary colors and secondary colors, that’s how! We use yellows, reds, and oranges to add power to the paintwork, highlights to the high points, and glow to the pigments. I won’t endorse the use of Cadmium colors as they’re toxic (use with caution and follow all recommended precautions!), but that’s the intensity you need to go for when finding substitutes. Like real yellows, reds, and oranges…the ones that make your eyes melt. Why? Because they provide the brightness necessary to wake up the glow as a high note and give you plenty of room to dampen them down or cleanly morph them within mixes. Indeed, you’ll find these colors immensely useful for lots of mixes if you know color theory! Indispensable! Just be sure to get a cool and warm version of each, like a warm yellow leans towards the reds such as Quinacridone Gold, Hansa Yellow Deep, Cadmium Yellow Deep Hue (the hue is different from real cadmium, being the nontoxic substitute) and a cool yellow, which leans towards the greens, like Lemon Yellow, Hansa Yellow, Nickel Azo Yellow, etc., for instance. A warm red leans towards the yellow and orange end of the spectrum while a cool red leans into the blue and purple end, for example. But lastly, orange is a lot harder to categorize as a warm or a cool color but very generally speaking, a cooler orange leans into the yellows while a warmer orange leans into the reds.
Now you can use these colors in mixes in any number of ways to get the target colors you need, and being so bright, they give you a lot of “room to work,” a lot more possibilities to mix towards. Like let’s take that chestnut example — let’s say your basic red chestnut — what would we use to create a highlight color? Well, we could use a warm yellow and a warm red and mix them with Burnt Sienna or Red Oxide for a highlighter with loads of pop. Bam! Or for a palomino, ease up on the red and lean more into the yellow. Whammo! Or for a bay, lean more into the oranges and reds or golds. Bang! The point is, if you want to maintain the clarity of your colors, you have to use clear, clean colors to brighten them. So think about how reds, yellows, and oranges factor into your target colors to get the various hues you need within mixes, don’t just think about your earth tones or what we’d call “horse colors.” Think beyond the browns! Just be careful of how the temperatures mix so you don’t inadvertently create an unintended tone. Like mixing the cool Nickel Azo Yellow with the cool Raw Umber will yield a greenish shade which isn’t suitable for most coat colors (but may be very useful for hoof color, palmar foot coloring, or dirt staining — every color has its place). But you know, try it anyway! You can always warm it up with a red for a lovely kind of unique brown.
Okay, then that said…how do we darken our browns without using black? Easy…color theory! Or more specifically, complementary and tertiary mixes! Just as those bright colors wake up our palette, knowing how to mix complementary and tertiary mixes helps us to slumber certain colors. The main point here though is this: You get these dampened colors through mixing, that’s the key. Sure, you might find a suitable dark color straight from the tube at times, but chances are, you’ll have to mix one most of the time. The good news is that a host of browns are easy to make with all sorts of color mixes so you have a lot of adaptability at your fingertips in this! So say, for that red chestnut, how do we create a shade color without using black? Well, take your Burnt Sienna or Red Oxide and mix in a complementary color to its red base, something like Ultramarine or Prussian Blue, just a bit, just enough to darken it, not overpower it otherwise you’ll create a black. But hit the right proportion, and that’ll create a lovely dark brown. Or for a variation, try Pthalo Green or Hooker’s Green for a cooler brown, more like a Raw Umber. Or even if you mix oranges and blues, you’ll create a host of lovely dark browns. This also works great for bays, this using blues and greens to create dark browns, so try it! But again, be mindful of your color temperatures to avoid creating mud, so mix cool with cool and warm with warm to avoid creating a muddy brown. When you start mixing together cool and warm is when you tend to get your muddy colors.
Now for that palomino we need to use “kin” colors, or darker colors in the same family as our base color of medium gold. So for example, take Raw Sienna and deepen it with a warm brown like Burnt Umber or Van Dyke Brown. You can mix it with Raw Umber, but that might be too cool and it’ll need a bit of warming up with some Burnt Sienna or Red Oxide or Terra Rosa. Or you can mix up a warm brown and mix it with that gold to get a gorgeous deep gold for your shading. The point is, black will turn that yellow green which we want to avoid so use dark browns instead as a darkening agent.
So how to lighten a brown without using white? If you notice, when you mix white into a brown, you get a taupe, beige, grey, or even a greige rather than a lightened brown. That’s the tinting power of white at work, something we want to steer away from if we want to lighten our browns. So to do that, think about using yellows, oranges, and reds instead to “pop” the color just like you did for highlights. Like adding a warm yellow to Burnt Umber renders a lovely warm lighter brown, for example. Or adding a red to Burnt Sienna really cranks it up a notch, or adding an orange to Terra Rosa makes that color really rev up more. The point is, think about using color rather than white to lighten your browns and you’ll find that your results are often much more on target and much more glowing.
Now granted, there will be times when that touch of white or touch of black will be called for to match a color or to give some opacity oomph to your mix. If that’s the case — do it. There are no real hard and fast rules with color and Nature because, to Nature, color is just color! Really, as long as you’ve matched your color, that’s all that really counts!
Taking On The Day
Now if you want to dampen your whites for markings and patterns for a more natural look, opt away from using blacks to darken them as you’ll get greys and that doesn’t quite work. Instead, opt instead on using taupes, greiges, beiges, or even a bit of raw sienna into your whites to tame them down. You want to catch that warmth of the underlying flesh in a sense, and the reds coming from the tan component can do that for you. What you want is a “dirty white,” not a grey or a beige or a tan, so just a touch of a “browning” agent will do.
On that note, don’t knock mud! Muddy colors can be magical and just the ticket to the color needed! Remember, to Nature, color is just color! And so we should have no prejudices, either. Indeed, we can think of classic silver dapple and champagne, even mushroom and some pearls, as specialized mud, and the same can be said of some liver chestnuts and brown bays. Mud can also be instrumental for the palmar feet, hooves, chestnuts, and dirt staining. So know how to mix an effective mud as well because muddy colors are found on horses a lot more than we think at first glance!
Now for flesh colors for pinking, they run the gamut because of individual variation and the level of exertion the horse is enduring which would get the blood more to the surface. Even the temperature that day can affect how pronounced pinking is as can how short the coat is, whether naturally shed or clipped. So pay attention to the situational details when considering pinking. Any which way, some handy ways to mix up flesh tones are at our easy disposal. A quick way is to mix Burnt Sienna with Titanium White for a basic “flesh” color. You can add in a bit of reds or yellows, even oranges, to shift it any direction you want. You can mauve it up with a touch of brown, too, even a teensy touch of blue can spin it into the necessary direction. What you want to do is avoid a flesh tone that’s too-yellow, too-orange, or even too-red. Flesh has to be within the “flesh bubble” to read right, so practice mixing it if needed. Likewise, avoid pinking that’s “too hot” as in too pronounced for the situation depicted by the sculpture; pinking is often best when it’s on the subtle side. However, as you know, on the muzzle and on the “parts” pinking can be more intense so don’t be overly timid there. Now if you’d like to mix up your flesh tones from primary colors, that’s fun and easy to do, and gives you lots of control in terms of manipulating the temperature and tone. So the trick is to create a starter hue, usually a peach color. We do this by mixing a red and a yellow together with a white. You can add more red for a warmer flesh or more yellow for a cooler flesh. If you want to lighten it, add white (flesh is one of those colors that’s best lightened with white rather than another color) and if you want to darken it, add a touch of burnt sienna or a teeny bit of blue. Or for another mix, try Burnt Umber, Titanium White, a warm yellow, a warm red, and a warm blue. To lighten it, add white and yellow or to darken it, use Burnt Umber and blues. Adding in more reds and yellows will make the flesh color warmer while veering towards the blues will cool it down.
Then for pigmented colors for dark skin, think about mixing blacks with taupes, or with browns and whites to create an array of greiges and charcoals. Or simply take your homemade black mixture and adjust it with a touch of white to grey it up a snidge. See the thing is, if we base our dark skin on a dark greige or charcoal, we have “room” to paint in shadows with black for eyelids, the lip line, inside the nostrils, etc. whereas if we used just straight black, we wouldn’t have that opportunity to add depth and detail. And dark skin can either be a warm charcoal or a cool charcoal, depending on the individual and coat color, so pay attention to its temperature, too.
Now certain colors like champagne have a purply-greige thing going on with their skin, a light grey-brown with a lavender cast. This can be tricky to mix to stay on target, but think about adding a bit of brown and a touch of red and blue or just straight up purple to your grey mix to hit it. Likewise, many double dilutes like isabella have a darkish brownish pink or brownish peach skin which is easy to make by mixing your flesh tones with a touch of browns to deepen it a snidge. These mixes can also be adjusted for temperature as needed as individual variation in that department can play a part in that color story, too.
Now hooves can be a rather surprising source of color use! They really aren’t just black and white to make grey for dark ones, or “shell” color for pale ones. There’s often a lot more going on with them if we really pick them apart. Like look for greens, purples, blues, and browns in dark hooves and greiges, golds, rusts, greys, and browns in pale hooves. Hooves can also shift from warm to cool on the same hoof or between feet and horses, so look for that aspect, too. So say, for dark hooves, start with a basic grey and then add in necessary colors to hit your target. For instance, take a black and a white, and mix them together then paint your hoof. Now add a touch of a yellow or gold to a portion of that mix to green it up a bit to add some shading and color shifting to that hoof. Then consider browner mixes, blacker mixes, and bluer mixes on the same hoof, melding it all together with careful brushwork. In the end, your hoof will have a lot more depth and believability than simply being painted in just a black and white series of greys. As for pale hooves, you can mix Titanium White, Burnt Sienna, and Raw Sienna together for a basic “shell” color. Then make adjustments by adding in various colors to create those subtle tonal shifts like adding in browns, greys, blues, yellows, even oranges and greens, all of which work together to add complexity and depth to your pale hooves.
Conclusion
See, the options and possibilities are wide open when you’re able to paint beyond whites and blacks! When you understand color theory, in particular, a host of beautiful browns, greys, golds, peaches, fleshes, tans, rusts, and other horsey colors are all within your grasp when you work beyond white and black, so stretch for that gold ring! Using color to wake up color isn’t only highly effective with more beautiful results, but it’s also fun and fascinating, making your painting experience that much more interesting and exploratory. Mixing paint becomes a series of fun discoveries in a sense, and you’ll soon find your favorite mixes for certain things like hooves, palmar feet, chestnuts, pinking, etc. (Recommended reading: A Cacophony Of Color: The Magic Of Unlikely Pigments)
And make no mistake, having a varied portfolio can be important as well as fun. Like when all your pale hooves look exactly the same, that kind of habit veers away from realism, doesn’t it? Each pale hoof is different, and so should be our painted feet. Or when all our pinking is the same or when all our bays are carbon copies, not only are we falling short of our own potential, we’re also missing out on a fuller expression of reality with all its cool options. If we want to capture that genii in a bottle then, we have to not only See color in life but we have to know how to manipulate it on our palettes, too, and then — and only then — can we come closer to reality in our paintwork.
It’s also so exciting to work from an inspiring reference and then be able to match all those colors much more precisely! Our confidence builds, our moxie increases, our inspirations compound, and we stretch ourselves ever further in our skillsets and expectations, allowing us to progress a lot faster and more effectively. In other words, knowing how to use color not only improves our paintwork, it accelerates our improvement in unexpected ways as only it can. It feeds our motivations and inspirations with a hefty dose of curiosity and excitement and gives us the tools to realize our visions with more authority and authenticity. If there was ever a way to wake up our painting skills, effective color use would be it! So get those colors out of their proverbial bed and get them fed a great breakfast of know-how then put them to work — we can’t wait to see your bright-eyed and bushy-tailed colors in action, full of glow and gorgeousness!
“All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.”
— Marc Chagall
