Zed A. Shaw, Painter

That why if you look at the sky, there's chunks of red, because I had to change the shape of the bushes, and I only had some reddish-blue from doing some other shadows. Or how the bushes seem to fit into the sky because I had to paint into the sky with green and yellow.pic.twitter.com/fuVJLzgdPg

The other hack to this style of painting is the exploitation of optical mixing. Optical mixing is where I make something seem like it's mixed in the paint by just putting the two colors next to each other and letting the optics of your eye (and brain's perception) mix it.pic.twitter.com/x0xjgZMUJ4

So if you take this still of the painting (shrunk down) the bushes look like they don't have really red in them, but are just dull green, and you can't really see any orange. They "read" as green bushes that are not crazy green.pic.twitter.com/jI1m4wTEhN

But if I zoom in close you can see that there is very pure yellow and red right next to the green, even straight orange. Up close, it has an abstract quality. Far away these color textures mix together optically before hitting your eye and create a scintillation effect.pic.twitter.com/hPiCMQoSSC

This is what Van Gogh was doing, and it's also why photos of his paintings (and Monet's) are not very good. Cameras don't have a brain that interprets optical mixing so it doesn't show it as well, but if you walked up close to this painting you'd see he does it.pic.twitter.com/OqmKaEP93k