Over on the Street Team we are paying close attention to the mix that occurs when we work with paint. Sometimes you start with two colors but end up with a whole range in between. While we look at those blends we are also noting how much fun it can be to observe color naming, and will attempt to claim a few names of our own. Hop over and see the creative mess I made on the living room wall trying to find the right color, with supplies from my studio. Come over and play!
With color mixing on my brain I decided to pull out some old work – from college! I had this phenomenal teacher who taught me so much – not only about the properties of color, but of perception. It really was theory and practice*. She required that we mount our work on gray mat board, type the objective and analysis, insert all in plastic sleeves and present in a three-ring binder. It seemed like a pain at the time but I am so happy to have these past assignments. Thank you Ms. Fargo. She also made us use gauche vs. acrylic, and we had to purchase sable brushes ($$$ for a college student) so we would leave no evidence of strokes in the work. I appreciate having learned that discipline but love bending the rule now – the strokier the better! I want my work to look like a person made it, textures and all. Why try to make a perfectly smooth swatch of painted surface that could easily have been cut from colored paper?
Here are some of those assignments….This first one had a limitation that we choose a hue on the opposite side of the color wheel than our favorite. My old fave was red so I went with green. That began a new love affair with green. It lasted for nearly twenty years until I went back to red.
Then there was this one – created from magenta, yellow, cyan, white and black. You should have seen my work table. Hundreds of scraps of painted stripes of color and then heaps of cuttings and retired exacto blades.
And this…the Chroma Bridge…such a fascinating exercise to blend two hues to find all the middle steps.
I faked out the Chroma Bridge below with photoshop. A few steps of hitting gradation between two colors then isolating into rectangles. It is a quick cheat…but like I said earlier, I really appreciate that I had the opportunity to learn the rules the real way first.
I have to name 2 through 8 for Crusade No, 53. Any suggestions? Take a stab at it.
Thanks for all the kinds words regarding my articles in Art Journaling and Somerset Studio. I will be talking more about it soon – so stay tuned. Have a good weekend.
* in theory and practice may sound familiar….it's part of the subtitle of the recent HIM album 😉