Colour Theory Journal

I have talked about colour theory and the start of my colour theory journal.  Today I'm going to show the work I have been doing in the colour journal.

However first I wanted to share this post with you: My Unique Colour Story.  This was a class I did at The Festival of Quilts last year and had forgotten about until I was looking for some photos for another blog post.

Today's post is a bit disjointed - sorry.  I feel like I'm just throwing bits at the page but I hope it will be helpful.

Here's a really useful website if you want to be able to identify the colours in your photograph to be able to turm it into art: Snap Your Colors. (Sorry about the quality of my example)

An interesting blog post I found Expressing with colour and another series of really good blog posts on colour theory.  And here's my Pinterest board.

And now back to my colour theory journal.   I have used different makes of paint which has worked better than I thought.  In the online class Pam Carriker suggests only using one make of paint but doing several of these journals for all the different paint makes that you have.  I probably won't ever do that but I may try it with my Inktense crayons and bars.

Front cover

Still lots of space to fill and colour wheels to complete.

I bought the class as an online video but I have just found a companion guide that is downloadable.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

Continuing with colour theory

Last week I talked about colour theory and showed you a sneak peek of the journal I made from the Pam Carriker online class.

When I was preparing my journal I only had six of the colours I needed to make a colour wheel.  These are Dylusions acrylic paints.  For the journal I chose three colours - the instructions were for four colours.  I rarely do exactly what the tutor says.  Mind  you in this case it was that I didn't have the 4th colour.   I mixed the acrylic paint with some water in some spray bottles.

Remember the colours on the colour wheel last week?   The colours above are Squeezed Orange, Fresh Lime and London Blue.  According to my colour wheel they match Yellow-Orange, Yellow-Green and Blue respectively.  The other 3 colours I didn't use are Lemon Zest, Vibrant Turquoise and Crushed Grape which match Yellow, Blue-Green and Red-Violet.

Journal Preparation
I thought I had followed the instructions for putting the paint on the pages

but when I went back to the video I found I hadn't  So I did the backs of the papers the correct way.

When you fold the pages and sew the journal together you get spreads like this.

When I went to Art from the Heart I bought some of the missing colours and set about making my own colour wheel.  Ideally you would do this with only one make of paints and do separate colour wheels for all your different makes of paint.

I set the paints around my colour wheel and the red and Blue-Violet were wrong so I rummaged around and found some Golden paints that were okay.  In fact I might go through all the Golden paints I've got to see if I could do this exercise just with Golden.

Then I drew round a template to get the large circle and I found this piece of plastic canvas and worked out where the middle of the large circle was and measured where I needed to make my lines.

I used a pencil and ruler to draw the lines.

I made pencil notes of the paints as I painted in the segments

When the paints were dry I wrote the colours on the wheel and cut it out.

After I had made my colour wheel I decided I would use the other colour to make a page for the journal.  I'll show you that in my next post.

And look what I found on YouTube via Pinterest

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

Colour Theory

I saw an online class advertised by Craft Daily for a workshop with Pam Carriker on how to effectively use the colour wheel.  That reminded me that I had done some work on colour many moons ago and had always planned to follow it up.  When I says many moons I'm talking 2008.

I have taken photographs of my journal pages from back then and the photos of photos aren't really of a very good quality. (Sorry.)

I used embroidery threads to show the colours in the colour wheel rather than use paint.

Primary colours - red, yellow, blue

Secondary colours added - orange, green and purple.  Secondary colours are achieved by mixing two primary colours together.  Red + Yellow = Orange.   Yellow + Blue = Green.   Blue + Red = Violet.

Then I added the tertiary colours.  The tertiary colours are made by mixing one primary colour with the secondary colour adjacent to it.

Tertiary Colour mixing
Red + Orange = Red-Orange       Yellow + Green = Yellow-Green    Blue + Violet = Blue-Violet
Red + Violet = Red-Violet     Yellow + Orange = Yellow-Orange    Blue + Green = Blue-Green

I made a larger colour wheel using lots of different types of threads.

I wound the colours around cards using different shades.  This helped to see what colours look like by the side of another colour.

I found magazine pictures to demonstrate warm and cold colours.  Warm colours are considered to be yellow through to red-violet on the colour wheel and the cool colours are yellow-green through to violet.

I found this exercise in a magazine.  Cross stitch leaves to show analogous colours.   Analogous colours are those colours next to each other on the colour wheel.   You can use two to five colours.

And finally stitches with black, grey and white to show shades, tones and tints.

A Shade is the colour plus black.  A Tone is a colour plus grey.  A Tint is a colour plus white.

Harmonious colour schemes
Complementary colours (not shown here) arre two colours directly opposite each other on the wheel eg blue and orange.    A Triad scheme uses three colours equally spaced from each other on the colour wheel eg orange, violet, green.  A Tetrad is a combination of 4 colours that are two sets of complements eg blue and orange with red and green.

This information is always in the back of my mind and I own a couple of shop bought colour wheels. But it's always worth trying out paints to see how the colours work, which I haven't done for a long while.

So I signed up for Pam Carriker class and I have started - hopefully I will finish.  Here's a sneak preview of one page of the journal we had to make for the class.

Next Sunday I'll show you some of the journal pages from the class.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice