Tip: The "Soup" Method of Color Harmony

Several years ago I was told by Meghan McDonald that she added brown to all her mixed colors to give color harmony to her landscape paintings. A year or so later John Hughes explained how nature injects a common hue in all the colors that we see. He said that the sky, or other shared lighting, casts a subtle color on everything. This may be a cool blue from a clear sky or a warm orange-red at sunset. This shared hue causes natural color harmony. That is what we are accustomed to seeing.

Edgar Payne suggests something very similar:

"Previously mixing a large amount of dominant shade, then injecting it in every color used is sometimes called the "soup" method, but whatever name it is given it is a great help not only in developing taste but in creating harmony."

You have probably seen artists that mix a single color in the center of their palette and then use that color to influence all the colors they mix (see the term mother color). Kevin MacPherson paints this way as do many other successful plein air painters.

Take a look at the palettes of Gustave Moreau and Vincent Van Gogh. It sure looks like they shared many of the same colors in those that they mixed.

Gustave Moreau's Palette

Vincent Van Gogh's Palette