I learned a bunch of stuff from my Unofficial Artist In Residency at Salem Willows. Today I want to focus on desaturated colors.

I mentioned this in the video I’ll link below. Colors in the distance are desaturated, also a bit hazy. You can observe this When you look out across a distance, things further and further away appear more and more faded. Colors are a bit more muted. In my area distant trees appear a bit more blue and pale. In other areas I see artists represent colors as more pink or purple the more distant they are from the viewer.  Capturing this color change is interesting.

It’s necessary to convince the viewers eye to buy that the image has depth.

The colors need to desaturate to make the foreground pop.

​With acrylics and watercolors you do this by mixing on the palette or paper. For acrylics and gouache you can add a hint of white. For watercolor, more water and a touch of the color opposite.

With oil pastels, it’s a little different. Some brands blend well others just don’t. Some people use a palette knife and mix their oil pastels on a palette and apply with a knife.

I decided to mix the colors that I’d use desaturated in a series of tests to see what colors I could get. Generally I used 2 colors- a blue and a green. On some I added white and others I didn’t.

Here are images of my tests and some images made with them.