22 May 2010

Painting stories, week 5

Colour - using a base mixture (sludge - a little each of blue, red, yellow) to unify a palette. Here, the basis was the dark green big square, made - how? - warm yellow, warm blue, cool red. I was thrilled to see that with a cool blue it made the teal and turquoise -Here's the palette with some of the mixtures. The white can "mess things up" -
At the end of the day, this busy-ness --
I mixed warm yellow and cool red (and could have added a bit of blue, but forgot!) and then mixed it with lots of colours on the right side of the paper - and gradually added squares around the greenish work. It's a mess, but putting paint down "somewhere" and seeing how it went with the adjacent colours was full of surprises. Also surprising were some of the colours you can mix, even when you don't know exactly what you're doing - the knowledge builds up. It's worth doing this regularly.

The photos of the palette are supposed to help me work out how to produce some of the more delicious colours - periwinkle blue, for instance, and a violet that is full of summer twilight....
I felt very confused for a lot of the class. It's a learning curve.

My neighbour worked with this lovely limited palette, which she had absolutely no problem mixing -
Here's her palette - the warm yellow is a different shade than mine, more like an ochre -

1 comment:

Julie said...

You have brought back memories with these colour mixing exercises Margaret and reminded me that it's a good idea to 'play' like this more often.