One of the things I often admire about advanced painters is their ability to infuse a single object with multiple colors and make it read well. It can be subtle or overt, but it done properly, it can give a painting a lively visual interest.

As a painter, I stuggled to understand how this was done. Every time I tried to emulate this effect, the result looked horrible – disjointed, splotchy and just plain wrong. I tried again and again, always without success, until I tried something on a whim.

On of the painters I admire who does this extremely well is Richard Schmid. I have his beautiful book of landscape paintings, Richard Schmid: The Landscapes, and while looking at one of the paintings in which he does this, I had a notion to try something. I photographed the page in the book, brought it into Photoshop and converted the image to grayscale.

Bingo! A veritable daylight bulb of realization appeared above my head. Suddenly, I could see that the key to this is to keep the values of the colors within a close range. When viewed in grayscale, many of the passages of multiple colors merged into simple shapes, the colors unified by their closeness in value.

Ironically, I had not long before read right past this in Schmid’s superb book on painting, Alla Prima: Everything I Know about Painting. This book (which I cannot recommend highly enough) is so dense with valuable insights about painting, that you can miss the importance of some ot them if you read too quickly.

If you decide to order any of Schmid’s books or videos, order directly from the official Richard Schmid website. Not only will they be cheaper than through Amazon, more of the proceeds will go to his family and heirs.