Assignment 2: Building a visual vocabulary: Colour, design, printing and painting - Project 3 colour - Stage 1 - Introduction and preparation

Taking a deep breath for a major blog update on my Assignment 2 work!

Assignment 2 - Building a Visual Vocabulary: Colour, Design, Printing and Painting.

Have to say I started out this assignment with gusto, and I'm certainly looking forward to the printing and painting sections as a I love working with printed textiles and handpainting fabrics. And I am determined to relax and sketch with less anxiety.

Project 3: Colour

Music to my ears! As  a dyer by trade I live colour. Colour mixing/blending and interpretation is something I do in my own textiles work, when I tutor hand-dyeing students and when I am creating things purely for pleasure too. I even read books about colour!

That said, my work is almost entirely with dyes and dyes perform differently to paints and other media so this will be interesting with plenty to learn.

Stage 1 - Introduction and Preparation
Here are some colour wheels I created to try out different media and explore the density of the colour, the effect of blending/overlaying vs pre-mixing. I used six base colours (a warm red/blue/yellow and a cool red/blue/yellow) From these I made 12-colour wheels to create the secondary and tertiary shades.

Cotman Watercolours

 Crayola Crayons

Aquarelle watercolour pencils (overlaid on outer ring, wet-blended on inner ring)

Interestingly the watercolours and the crayons produce quite similar tones, the watercolour pencils are cooler with the purples in particular being more aubergine than, say, violet, when blended. The pencils do take on a paint-like appearance, however, when used with water. (I pencilled first then overpainted with water).