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The end of the rainbow is in sight
11/08/2020
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet
The rainbow only lists seven colours but as my ongoing colour tests show, there are a lot of different options out there for each of them.
This week its blue, then next week will focus on both indigo and violet. When I've finished all the tests, I will use the colour swatches to decide which of the many tubes of colour can be used up and not replaced, and the ones for which I need to find an alternative. There has been much information about potential health risks from cadmium, so I am especially keen to find some other yellows and orange to use. Some of the other colours are very similar and I need to decide which to rule out and which to keep.
From an artist's perspective, colour is often analysed using a colour wheel. This has twelve sections, and is built around the three primary colours - red, yellow and blue.
In my Instagram and Facebook posts, I have often referred to a colour that is warmer or cooler, and that describes the influence of the colours either side. So, for example there are yellow-orange colours which sit between yellow and orange on the wheel.
Sometimes I think back to when I first started to paint regularly. We were in Spain and I went to a studio run by a lovely Spanish teacher Estefania. Tuition and conversation was in Spanish so as well as learning a lot there about working in acrylics, I was able to practice and improve my language skills. There was a big focus on colour mixing. Students were only supposed to use magenta, cyan, process yellow and white; everything else was mixed from them. We started by painting a colour wheel; mixing red and yellow to make orange, the adjusting the amount of each colour to make red-orange or yellow-orange was relatively easy. The most difficult to mix was black; not usually depicted on a colour wheel but in our case we were told to paint it in the centre.
When I wanted to switch to working in oils, there was strong resistance because the mediums are smelly and upset some people, Instead I was told to try water soluble oils. To test out this new medium, I went back to basics again buying just three colours and white. Having subsequently worked in traditional oils, there is no comparison, but I was able to create a painting from just those four tubes of paint. The result is 'Frangipani 2' in the Reflections of the Nature gallery..
This week its blue, then next week will focus on both indigo and violet. When I've finished all the tests, I will use the colour swatches to decide which of the many tubes of colour can be used up and not replaced, and the ones for which I need to find an alternative. There has been much information about potential health risks from cadmium, so I am especially keen to find some other yellows and orange to use. Some of the other colours are very similar and I need to decide which to rule out and which to keep.
From an artist's perspective, colour is often analysed using a colour wheel. This has twelve sections, and is built around the three primary colours - red, yellow and blue.
In my Instagram and Facebook posts, I have often referred to a colour that is warmer or cooler, and that describes the influence of the colours either side. So, for example there are yellow-orange colours which sit between yellow and orange on the wheel.
Sometimes I think back to when I first started to paint regularly. We were in Spain and I went to a studio run by a lovely Spanish teacher Estefania. Tuition and conversation was in Spanish so as well as learning a lot there about working in acrylics, I was able to practice and improve my language skills. There was a big focus on colour mixing. Students were only supposed to use magenta, cyan, process yellow and white; everything else was mixed from them. We started by painting a colour wheel; mixing red and yellow to make orange, the adjusting the amount of each colour to make red-orange or yellow-orange was relatively easy. The most difficult to mix was black; not usually depicted on a colour wheel but in our case we were told to paint it in the centre.
When I wanted to switch to working in oils, there was strong resistance because the mediums are smelly and upset some people, Instead I was told to try water soluble oils. To test out this new medium, I went back to basics again buying just three colours and white. Having subsequently worked in traditional oils, there is no comparison, but I was able to create a painting from just those four tubes of paint. The result is 'Frangipani 2' in the Reflections of the Nature gallery..
