I have a few things to thank Jeff Freedner for. By arguing and discussing with him, both on other blogs and via e-mail, I've learned a lot. During one discussion I mentioned that I'd like to write a computer program to take a color you give it and tell you what oil paints to mix to make that color. He replied that Liquitex had a program called Pixel2Paint which does just that, albeit only for Liquitex acrylics. I have no intention of ever using Liquitex acrylic paint, but I downloaded the program figuring it might point me in the right direction. While fiddling with it to match a skin tone I was interested in, I realized the color mix the program gave me could, with a little tweaking, get close to a color I've been looking for over the last couple of years.
I live in northern New Jersey in the New York City metropolitan area. I spend a lot of time on the New Jersey Turnpike, like most people trying to get the fuck out of New Jersey. And what you see from the Turnpike are a lot of industrial structures, a lot of smoke and steam, a lot of marshland, and hanging over all of it the sodium glare sky. It's the color of streetlight reflected off the bottom of the clouds, and it's an amazing, indescribable color, a sort of yellowish purplish gray, or a grayish purplish yellow -- it's really just outside of something you can properly sense.
I've wanted to capture that color for years. I spent a lot of time -- and a lot of expensive paint, so much paint! -- trying to get close for my painting George Washington Bridge -- Night. I didn't get close. In fact the closest I've ever gotten was entirely by accident, years earlier, in a painting hanging in my living room which I nevertheless hardly ever look at.
Using Pixel2Paint as a rough guide, I began mixing, and the color I ended up with made me so happy I stole a sheet of canvas paper from my daughter's stash and painted this: Three Antennas, 16x20 inches.
It's not perfect -- I wish I had gotten the antennas in parallel -- but the color of the sky is almost, almost there.
