STARTING ON COLOUR

Colour wheel side view showing freshly painted texture!

The next section in the book is about colour theory.  The first part involves mixing the primaries, then gradually adding black and white. Here is step one.  I am just beginning.  The light was bad, and I will have to redo the mixing.  I have done this exercise many times before, but it always feels like a journey of discovery.  This time however I will go more carefully, and will keep other work going meantime to keep me fresh

A section of the colour exercise

The first palette!

I completed the first exercise, and today (3rd February) I started on the second exercise - painting the colour wheel.  I have done this so many times before, but this time it was different. I really concentrated on what I was doing and I used the paint thick.  Because of my previous work with dye I have generally preferred a thin watery feel to colour, but paint definitely needs to be thick.  Enjoy the beautiful texture and let that be its three dimensional quality!  Also I have always tried to economise with paint - big mistake.  Using paints such as oil or acrylic to explore colour really only works if you are working on paintings or something that needs a firm non absorbent ground.  Dye is so much more fluid and the colours behave differently.

Detail of the colour wheel with strips of added white paint to show true colour better

Colour wheel with strip version

Here is the strip from above in greyscale

from the phone app

Here is my required eight tone strip painted

Colour wheel and tone

The exercise here was to take each of the 12 colour wheel shades and assign them on a tonal scale.   I cheated a bit, photographed the shades and translated into greyscale, then compared them to my tonal ladder, result above. Very difficult to see colour in tone!