Saturday, January 21, 2012

The art of the color wheel

I decided since I can't seem to paint much else that I would try my hand at a color wheel. Two color wheels actually. The book "Color Mixing Bible" recommends doing a warm and a cool version so that is what I did. I traced two circles on an 11x14 canvas board and sectioned them off. The primary colors on the warm side are Cadmium Red Medium, Cadmium Yellow Light and Cerulean Blue. The primary colors on the cool side are Permanent Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Yellow Medium and Prussian Blue.

I absolutely love the warm colors. The colors are beautiful. I expected the blue and red to create a violet color but instead it created a deep, brick red color. I have read that many artists keep a tube of purple paint with them because it is hard to mix your own and I see that I may have to do the same.

Along with the warm color wheel, I really like the right half of the cool color wheel. The colors are deep and rich. I found out that the cool blue over powers the other colors very quickly though. The blue section near the Alizarin Crimson has twice as much red as it does blue and you have too look very hard to see any difference. Reflected light is subtractive in nature, that is, the more color you mix the darker it gets, and this proves that out nicely. Now the cool yellow mixed with the cool blue very nicely creating subtle shades of dark green.

The next exercise I need to do is try mixing the warm colors with the cool colors and see what I get. One tip I saw on YouTube said not to do that because the colors end up looking muddy, but there is no better way to find out than to try it myself. Yet another exercise to try is to create shades of grey. I think I can tint a mix of Alizarin Crimson and Prussian blue with white to get shades of grey. The final exercise is to create color patches varying the amount of each color mixed to get even more shades of the colors.

This was a very worthwhile exercise and I recommend every new painter try it along with the other exercises I mentioned.

The photo doesn't fully translate the results

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