Rooftop Color Temperature Study ala Ian Roberts

4/16/22 Green Lake neighborhood

 While sketching at Swanson’s, Ching and I had an interesting discussion about color temperature. Afterwards she sent me some links to Ian Roberts’ YouTube channel in which he demonstrates using color temperature to create dynamic urban paintings. Although I have been intrigued with color temperature ever since I took Sarah Bixler’s colored pencil workshop last fall, I haven’t had many opportunities to apply the concepts on location. Our conversation reignited my fascination.

Driving around the Green Lake neighborhood, I found this street with a good view of a block of rooftops. As many instructors do, Roberts talks a lot about simplifying everything to values and shapes. I went a step further and even simplified my palette to my favorite CMYK primary triad. Since Roberts uses oil paints, I had to “translate” painting techniques to watercolor pencils, but it was helpful to recall the optical-mixing concepts I had learned in Bixler’s workshop.

Using an approach that is closer to watercolor glazing than to opaque oils, I put a cyan tint on all the grayish rooftops and activated that layer. All the rooftops were facing the sun, so I used yellow to warm them up. Almost all the houses were brick, so I used magenta and applied water to that layer. To cool down the shady house fronts, I applied dry cyan over the magenta. I also used cyan for the cast shadows and other darkest areas.

I’m not sure if the rooftops “read” as being sunlit – maybe I should have skipped the initial cyan glaze. Using a triad palette does help me to get away from being too tied to “realistic” colors, but when I see a sunlit gray roof, it’s still difficult for me to represent that with yellow. But I guess as long as the values ring true (I hope they do), the hues don’t matter.

Incidentally, in case you aren’t familiar with Ian Roberts, I highly recommend any of his videos, which he puts out weekly. They are succinct (usually less than 10 minutes each) and highly focused on basic principles of representational art. He is an excellent teacher. Initially, I thought that his oil painting tutorials would not apply much to my use of colored pencils, but he puts such a strong emphasis on key principles such as composition and values that the medium one uses hardly matters. I sure wish I had known about him a couple of months ago when he was offering a live online course in mastering composition – that would have been a remarkable opportunity.

I’ve only just begun to go through his treasure trove of informative lessons, but so far, here are a couple of favorites that pinpoint some of the most important principles to learn about any kind of representational art making:

5 Principles to Master Anything

The #1 Composition Rule You Cannot Break