How to Choose the Right Colors for Your Painting

How to choose the right color is a question that often bothers professional painters and those who are just getting started. Although there is no definitive and concrete answer, there are some guidelines that can help. In this article, Brooklyn-based landscape painter Al Serino states the basic pros and cons of each technique. Once you find the right balance between what you consider as pro and con, you will find the right colors for you.

Generalization is impossible, as choosing the color with which one painter will achieve his maximum depends on his skill, technique development, but also on his patience and other personal characteristics. So, if you are tidy, precise and simply hate the mess, there is little to no chance that you will be comfortable with colors that can dirty the entire space around the artwork as you apply them. In addition to that, Al Serino believes it is important to consider the future observer. Different colors and techniques evoke different emotions.

There are many types of paints, but in most cases, artists choose to paint with watercolors, acrylic or oil paints.

Watercolors are easy to use. Simply dilute the desired color with water on the pallet, then apply it to the canvas. If you need to make the picture lighter - use more water, if you need to darken some parts - take less water and more color. If something needs repairing, the water will help to clear the excess. Watercolor paintings are always easier and more emotional and technically simple. That's why this is an ideal option for beginners.

Generally, watercolors are in most cases accessories that make the painting somehow blurry, muted. It will evoke the appropriate emotion and feeling on landscapes where let’s say, it is raining. When such landscapes are well done, you can almost feel the humidity and the cold. Oil paints, on the other hand, will produce shapes of clear lines that almost always appear rich and radiant. Whatever emotion you want to convey in detail, you can’t go wrong with oil paint. Acrylics are somewhere in the middle. Again, Al Serino reminds us that the artist’s technique is crucial in order to get the most out of acrylic paints and to enhance their similarity to watercolors or oil paints.

Albert Serino Tips on Using Acrylic Paints

Versatile, vibrant and affordable, acrylic paints can be painted on just about anything. Discover how to get started with this type of painting as Brooklyn-based landscape painter Albert Serino shares his top tips for painting with acrylic paint.

If you are working on your painting techniques and want to try acrylic painting, Albert Serino has everything you need to get started. Acrylics are fast-drying paints that can be used straight from the tube, as oil paints, or can be diluted with water, like watercolor. They are extremely versatile and colorful, providing the artist with a wide range of textures and colors.

American Landscape Painting History

During the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age, Landscape painting appeared as a distinct genre, as religious art fell out of favor in a Protestant society.

For more detailed information about the history of the American landscape, we spoke with the landscape painter, Albert Serino.

Albert Serino dedicates to landscape painting since the early 90’s. His paintings, which have been presented to some of the most popular galleries in the USA and Canada, combine his long-standing interest in landscape, still life and portraiture.

Albert draws inspiration by art historical traditions as diverse as Chinese landscape painting, Surrealism and Folk Art.

He shared that in Europe, landscapes evolved from backgrounds in portraits of wealthy landowners to a prestigious art form embraced by Romantic painters. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these painters invested the natural world with allegorical and mythic significance in reaction to scientific advances of the Enlightenment.

The American Art was firstly dominated by landscape painting in the early part of the 19th century. Idealized images of a vast, a belief in its boundless prospects was deeply interwoven with its natural environment, and an unspoiled wilderness that reflected a nation whose identity, were introduced.

As the experienced landscape painter, Albert Serino further explains, landscape artists chronicled the disappearing wilderness and the expanding presence of modern civilization in the paintings, as the American frontier was pushed further westward. This paintings glorified industrial development for their patrons or served as reminders of the price of progress.

Works of mammoth scale were created by the painters of Hudson River School that attempted to capture the epic scope of the American landscape that favored contemplation of natural beauty. Works that placed a greater emphasis on the raw, terrifying power of nature, were created by other Hudson River School artists including Albert Bierstadt.

In the 1870s, the paintings of Thomas Moran of the Yellowstone River helped to persuade Congress to set aside the Yellowstone area as a national park.

The experienced landscape painter, Serino points out that the themes of urbanization and a yearning for the tranquility of pristine natural spaces began to replace romantic views of nature, by the dawn of the 20th century.

A group of New York artists led by Robert Henri, called the “Ashcan School” or Urban Realists, in the 1920s, focused on gritty urban scenes.

As it has been further explained by Serino, portraits that glorified the labor and lifestyle of agrarian rural America, were created by The Regionalist Painters during the 1930s. The Regionalist Painters is a group, of artists working primarily in the Midwest. Some of the members of this group include Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry as well as lesser-knowns like Marvin Cone.

The landscape has been approached with a variety of strategies by modern American artists, such as Serino. These strategies were influenced by European art movements such as abstract expressionism and cubism. In the artworks of Serino this influence can be also felt.

The American painter Charles Burchfield in the 1963 has stated: “An artist must paint, not what he sees in nature, but what is there. To do so he must invent symbols”.