Friday, May 02, 2008
Some very basic colour theory
I blogged about getting this book a while back and I’ve been using it a lot recently. Right now I’m reading the chapter on colour so I thought I’d share some of it with you as I work through the exercises.
This is my (rather scruffy) version of Johannes Itten’s Bauhaus 12 hue colour wheel:
(you can view a larger version on flickr)
As you can see the three primary colours, yellow, red and blue form the triangle at the centre with the secondary colours (the colours you get when you mix two primaries together) on the outer of the triangle.
You’ll notice that each of the little triangles point towards their respective colour block on the outer wheel and that complementary colours sit diametrically opposite each other on the wheel - yellow is opposite purple, blue is opposite orange and so on.
Nestled in between the primary and secondary colours on the colour wheel are the tertiary colours. Tertiary colours are made by mixing a secondary with one of its primaries.
To summarise:
3 primary colours: red, yellow, blue
3 secondary colours: orange, purple, green
6 tertiary colours
According to the book Delacroix had a 72-hue colour wheel. Now while recreating Itten’s wheel wasn’t a problem for me I don’t think I’d undertake Delacroix’s!
As the book points out, a true primary is neither warm nor cool but as very few manufacturers actually produce pure primaries you will find that some are cooler than others. The paints I used for this colour wheel were watercolours in warm tones:
yellow - gamboge hue (Rowney Georgian)
red - scarlet lake (Cotman)
blue - ultramarine (Cotman)
Being able to differentiate between warm and cool colours is important as mixing the wrong colours together can give you very poor results. For instance, as you can see from the graphic below that while theoretically blue and red make purple, if you choose the wrong red you can end up with a muddy brown instead. Here I have mixed the same blue, in this case Prussian, with three different reds, a cool pinkish red, Permanent Rose, a warmer red, Alizarin Crimson and finally Scarlet Lake, very warm in comparison to the other two reds. As you can see the results vary considerably.
The book recommends a particular palette and brands to use but as I already own several tubes of watercolour and none of my local art supply shops stock the brands recommended in the book I’ve had to make do with what I have and this is my nearest match to the palette suggested:
Lemon Yellow Hue
Gamboge Hue
Alizarin Crimson Hue
Scarlet Lake
Permanent Rose
Ultramarine
Prussian Blue
Sap Green
Dioxazine Violet
Chinese White
Yes, white. This surprised me as in art class (a million years ago) I was taught never to use white watercolour and that you should either let the white of the page show through or use white gouache instead. Apparently this is not the case in the world of botanical illustration.
That’s enough colour theory for today - I’ll come back to this again as I work through more of the exercises.
Listening to: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (read by Nadia May)
Posted in: Drawing and Illustration •
Comments:
i love that sap green ~ and your notebook is
magic to me ~ fills me with a longing wishing
i could sketch ~ thankfully i can enjoy your
beautiful talent here ~ those sketches of roses
are stunning...:)
Posted by maddie on 05/04 at 03:43 PM
good lessons here for me to learn.
will come back later to see and read this again and again until it sinks in.
your sketches are always wonderful to behold.
have fun with this.
Posted by Lynn on 05/04 at 05:42 PM
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