Bad Faery

Friday, May 23, 2008

Colour wheels

“It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.”
Paul Gauguin

I actually did these a couple of weeks ago but am only getting around to posting them now.

As mentioned in the last post being able to identify your warm and cool colours is a key to good colour mixing.

Even a novice to colour theory should be able to guess that the colours that fall within the yellow-orange-red section of the colour wheel are warm while the colours in the purple-blue-green range are cool. However you will also find that paints within the same hue will tend towards either cool or warm. Here’s how to identify them.

Warm reds such as Scarlet Lake or Vermilion lean to orange or yellow
Warm blues such as Prussian Blue lean to purple or red
Warm yellows such as Gamboge Hue or Indian Yellow lean to orange or red
Cool reds such as Permanent Rose or Alizarin Crimson lean to purple or blue
Cool blues such as Ultramarine lean to green or yellow
Cool yellows such as lemon yellow lean to green or blue

These are the colours that I used to create the colourwheels:

Warm
Scarlet Red
Gamboge Hue
Ultramarine

Cool
Lemon Yellow
Alizarin Crimson
Prussian Blue

Above: This colour wheel was made using warm primaries. Note how the warm Scarlet Lake and Ultramarine Blue create a plummy purple while the combination of Gamboge yellow and Ultramarine create a quite muted green.
On the left hand page that little star shape is the three primaries mixed together. You can see how they create a nice range of browns and blacks.

Above: This colour wheel was made using cool primaries. I like the quite rich green that the lemon yellow and prussian blue make and that tertiary red made by Alizarin Crimson and Lemon yellow is very lush! And again on the other page I’ve mixed the three primaries together, proof again that you can live without black in your palette.

Above; on the left a colour wheel made with two cool primaries, Alizarin Crimson and Lemon Yellow and a warm blue, Ultramarine. The cool red and warm blue make a great purple!
On the right, two warm primaries, Scarlet red and Gamboge hue and a cool Prussian Blue. I think that if I were painting blueberries that mix of red and blue would be the way to go!

“Raw umber is my favorite color. Whenever I see that color, I can see and smell leaves and new beginnings. Color is felt, after all.”
Thomas William Jones

Comments:

What an awful lot to learn about colors. This would bode me well in my quilt making I am sure, something I need to learn. At this point I just rely on my gut instinct and go for it.

Thanks for the lessons. I shall come back and read this again and again and hopefully it will sink in.

Posted by Lynn on 05/24 at 04:54 PM

i love your color wheel explorations!! fascinating!

Posted by leah on 05/24 at 09:39 PM

Hi, too much time has passed by but today I decided to go and knock at my blogfriends Bad Faery’s Door. And look, she has a new banner, soooo beautiful.
And look at these beautiful colour weels, thanks for sharing your sketchbook pages with us,
love
Andrea

Posted by Andrea on 05/31 at 05:02 PM

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