Day 0003

A pair of golden mangoes. I like the color yellow a lot, as it’s generally sunny and exciting, but without the freight of symbolism that red carries. Still, it’s a major pain to use it well. I use Cadmium Yellow Hue for my go-to yellow. The “hue” in the name just means that while it isn’t genuine cadmium yellow, the color in the tube has been formulated to behave as much like it as any non-metallic pigment can, that is, it’s (reasonably) opaque, intensely colored, and very warm. The hue colors are generally made from what are called synthetic organic pigments. These are bright, permanent colors that, while not having the opacity of metal pigments have the advantage of not losing so much chroma (color intensity) when mixed with other colors. In other words, the palest yellows, mixed with white, will still have a strong ‘yellowness’ about them, whereas with cadmiums, they get much duller. This can be a great asset when painting, provided you take it into account and make an effort to dull the color as I did here. Of course, you can dull yellow toward cooler or warmer, to vastly different effect, and that’s what I was trying to observe here. While my vision is pretty damn blurry, I seem to be able to pick up on warm and cool contrasts pretty well. The result of having a built-in neutral density filter? The result of doing this for forty years? Who knows.