Tell me about yourself, where you live and your background/lifestyle.
Hi, my name is Don Jusko.
I've been painting Maui on location from a VW van for twenty years, the best years of my life. I am fifty-seven years old now and I want to pass on some information and painting techniques I've learned.
I think the most important single issue relates to color and how we perceive it. The use of the three primary "Neutral Dark's", made from opposite color combinations with compatible pigments, is the key information toward achieving accurate dark colors and split analogous combinations.
Your color wheel must be exact, and the duel properties of Transparent Magenta, and Cyan should be recognized by the pigment painter.
Here is a color wheel theory for you to judge, with a description of the progression of paint through the ages.
http://www.mauigateway.com/~donjusko/1color.htm
The Light Color Wheel and the Pigment Color Wheel are the same, no matter what you may have read. They both use the same six primary and secondary colors, in similar combinations of opposition. I'll unite them for you and explain pigment transparency and why losing transparent Indian Yellow was such a tragedy.
There is no color black reflecting in nature. A black mirror subtracts light and color by absorbing them. There should be no pigment black on the artist's palette, as it dulls and absorbs the color, and it's unnatural looking. [Delacroix said gray was the enemy of all artists, I think he meant any color shaded with black, not just gray.] The artist painting from life needs opposite complementary colors to make the dark shade, not "Black" as Oswalt and others have suggested. The complimentary colors will be transparent or opaque, and opposite on the warm and cool scale. Learn to make each dark shade either warm, cool, or neutral.
We were taught the wrong complimentary colors and it persists to today. Yellow is not the opposite of Purple and Green is not the opposite of Red. Blue is not the opposite of Orange either, if Orange is the color of an orange and Blue is Ultramarine Blue.
We've been getting the wrong information since Newton's first color theory in 1666, right up through the colorists, Mayer, Runge, Goethe, Chevreul, Hering, Rood, Hofler, Munsell and Church-Oswalt. It takes the computer and a crystal for me to prove the pigment color wheel and the light color wheel are the same.
This course (here is the full course in One download) http://www.mauigateway.com/~donjusko/final.htm will explain the "Real Color Wheel" for light and pigment, along with a background on color in elements, crystals and pigments.
This section of the course explains all the painting mediums through time and follows the discovery of pigment up to today. http://www.mauigateway.com/~donjusko/1mediums.htm
I have reviewed the artists and their techniques chronologically, to match pigment color's development and progression in this section. http://www.mauigateway.com/~donjusko/1artists.htm
Included in this free course is the colored light explanation on rainbows, polarized color, multiple rainbows, and prisms. Both the light and pigment color wheel use the same twelve colors as in the Real Color Wheel.
"Art has abandoned the sound principles of craftsmanship and is therefore lacking in a dependable foundation." Max Doerner 1931
Today's chaotic art represents our times, the primitive nature of it, the result of two world wars. It's not the first time our craft has gone downhill, it's happened after each war period throughout time.
What can we do to paint anything we see accurately? We can learn from nature, and express the world as it's expressed to us. We can use the sound principles of drawing and painting, as in dividing distances into concentric rings around ourselves, and outlining objects on those rings. These concentric rings also provide distance separators for aerial perspective. We should not let the color values and content of each ring encroach on another ring values, this is important. http://www.mauigateway.com/~donjusko/1location.htm
We should base lineal perspective on degrees, centered on a horizon line of degrees, and mix colors from an accurate color wheel.
You can't learn to paint from a book, but you don't have to start from scratch either. Correct color and procedure make learning easier and faster.
Who first influenced you artistically?
My neighbor, she didn't consider herself very good but to an 8 year old she was my hero.
What first attracted you to the Internet?
Colleges do not seem to be teaching how to paint accurately any more. The internet offers the chance to reach a lot of artists that need this information. This section of my course (journal) includes the notes of 20 years painting on location. http://www.mauigateway.com/~donjusko/1location.htm