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

TMD: ReWind November week 2

We are continuing with the ReWind theme in Take Me Deeper at His Kingdom Come.  This week's them looks back to Honour, the theme for July.

I used some of stick on letters to put the word honour in several places.

At this point I had no idea what I was going to do and then as I had the black gesso out I put black gesso over the whole page.

I wasn't quite sure how gelatos would work with this but I decided to give it a go.  As you can see in the photo below I scribbled on the page and then blended the colours.  I tried a small section with a wet wipe which wiped off some of the colour so I used a piece of paper towel instead.

I went over the letters with a silver gelato.

I added words and a border with a white Sharpie

It's not one of my favourite pages but at least I learned that you can put gelato colours on black gesso.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

What inspires you?

If you are an artist of any kind what things do you use for inspiration?

I take lots of photographs of things I see that I believe will inspire my art.  But it rarely impacts my art because the photos sit on my computer or on an external hard drive and I don't look at them again.  Maybe the images sit in the back of my mind and appear in artwork without my realising it.  I remember a tutor once who said something like if we don't fill our eyes with inspiration, nothing will come out of our hands.  She said it better than that so I hope you know what I mean.

Here are some of the photos I took in Australia that I feel should influence me somewhere along the line.

A metal sculpture

Machinery

Cliffs

Rocks on the sea shore

The bark of a tree

Sandstone blocks in the park that from a distance look like blocks of wood

 

 A block of sandstone that looks like rusted metal

The Sydney Harbour bridge

Rocks in the mountain

Underground

A dead tree 

More mountain rocks

I'm sure you've noticed that most of these photos have a real textural quality to them.  I fee that they lend themselves to inspiring textile art.

What would you be inspired to do with these photographs?

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

PS: After I had written this post I came across this blog post by Lain Ehmann which I need to reread and inwardly digest.   I plan to come back and write about it.