Playing With Split Complementary Colors

For art everyday, today I did another color mixing study.  This one gave me lots of color combinations I really liked.  Its a split complimentry.  That is a color and 2 colors that are adjacent to its compliment.  The colors would be yellow blue violet and red violet. I started with Hansa yellow medium, and ultramarine blue and quinachridone crimson, and also using white and black. I now really want to make a painting with some of these colors.

Linking to Art Every Day Month

Exploring Color

I've been working on a painting for a special project.  I am not great at color mixing. In mixing flesh tones for my faces I always have trouble.  I can start out with three primaries and white and then need a brown for shadow and it always seems to be too green or pink, I just can't seem to get the portion right.  So I give in and use burnt sienna a lot. I want to learn this skill so I thought maybe if I took Julie Balzer's Getting Started With Color Mixing  class it might help.  I knew how to do most of what she shared but I kept thinking brown was a combo of red and green but I learned there are other ways to make brown. This little class just pushed me in a new direction. Julie also talks about the fact that if you mix your own colors your work is more unique.  I liked that idea. I really like these short and simple and inexpensive classes that she teaches.

I have a moon in the painting I'm working on and I wanted it to be golden colored. Had a hard time coming up with how to do that. Either it was too yellow or too orange, so I kept going back to a whitish grey moon which I didn't want. So I started making a sheet of Golden fluid acrylics samples. Just the gold like colors at first.  There are a lot of colors I have from that great sale I got at Michaels a few years ago, that I never use.  Time to remedy that. I hadn't planned a chart or it would be more uniform that this. Once I added the gold colors I ended up doing a chart of all the colors I have. Now I have made charts like this before but I never really used them. This time I studied the colors and did some practice mixes to come up with what I needed.  It was really a great tool. I don't know why I never did this before. Now I have the chart right with me so I know which colors I want to start with.

I really wanted to learn more about this subject. So I headed to the library to educate myself a little bit more and found these two books.  Betty Edwards book is more on the theory of color and understanding it.





















The color mixing bible is full of pages of charts of color mixes for all mediums.  Its pretty comprehensive.  I think I'll use the first book more.  I want to know the reasons behind the mixes so I can do it intuitively from now on. This is just one more way to challenge myself, do go deeper like my word of the year.

How do you challenge yourself?

Color Exploration Continues

The collage and color explorations continue. I thought I would go around the color wheel and at least do some of the basics. This project really was fun but I think I'll be taking a break from collage for awhile. At least until I get my studio cleaned up again.

Yellow- this is a color that I do not have that much of but with collage you only need small amounts.

I really had fun with the orange one. I don't know about you but when I start doing collage I can keep going and going and going.  I guess that means I have a lot of paper and images.

Reds are always fun, the colors are so rich and fun to work with.

The pink one seemed to want to have girls on board. I love both of these images. Such sweet faces.

I have done all the basic colors so I headed to black and white and some gold too.

The last one I did was all browns. The sheep are a card I got from Schacht Spindle Co.  I used to be a dealer for their equipment.  I have always loved their logo. I really enjoyed making all these collages. I did 2 pages of each color for a total of eighteen pages. It was a learning experience in the fact that Often what I thought would look good did not. The interplay of shades and tints of a particular color is a fascinating thing to explore. Why don't you try your own color studies? If you try this I love to hear about it.

Explorations in Color

I was feeling a little down so instead of going further down that road I decided to do a collage. I started with the plate image and then kept adding anything purple I could find.  It was so much fun.

So then I thought I'll do another color and chose blue and followed the same pattern. ANything blue was fair game.  At this point I decided to do all the colors and see where I end up.

This page is all green.   I am loving sticking to one color and I never know where that color will take me.  Soon I'll move on to yellow red and orange.  Those will be shown another day. If you need a jump start for art this always works for me. I love the idea of exploring color. Why don't you explore along with me.

What I did this summer

If you remember this post  Go look at it now before you look at the rest of the post.  You'll see over 160 carded batts. I spent the summer spinning them all and here are results.

This is my kitchen table with all the skeins of yarn I spun.  I watched TV and movies while doing all these skeins.

This is a closer view of some of the colors. Now I know the question will be, what are you going to do with all of that yarn. I will pull the colors that have several skeins and save them for another project. With the rest I will weave a blanket.

As you can see I have a lot of blues, greens and purples but there are also gold, peaches and pinks.

and some neutrals too. I think I have at least a little bit of most of the colors out there. I think this will make a fantastic blanket.