The Party is in Full Swing. Come join us!

 

What party is this? The latest project from little ol’ me, Sage. The Sage Arts podcast is more than up and running… I have 25 episodes up as of this posting, ready on your favorite podcast player (New to Podcasts? Click here to find out how easy it is to enjoy them!) and a new one coming out every week.

 

What’s This Podcast All About?

This podcast is all about feeding and exciting your muse. By enlightening or reminding you about important and maybe unconsidered aspects of creating and living as an artist, I hope to help you find more joy and satisfaction in what you do, sharing ways to create with authenticity and fearlessness, while supporting your uniquely defined version of success.

Now what the heck does that all mean? Well, let’s look at what this is and what this is not…

 

It IS…

… a way to consistently feed your muse

… all about you. Myself, my guests, and my guest co-hosts speak to the issues, curiousity, and hurdles that you as a creative deal with on a regular basis.

… focused on creating a more fulfilling, joyful, and meaningful artistic journey.

… a conversation that goes both ways with lots of opportunities for you to be heard.

 

It is NOT…

… all about polymer clay or any one medium, as it’s important stuff for all artistic folks.

… focused on “how-to” or the latest tools and materials.

… just interviewing successful artists and talking at you. Rather it is like a coffee house chat or other friendly gather and I include you, the listener, in every way I can.

 

I created this podcast to supercharge your creativity, motivation, and artistic style through novelty, story, conversation, and community. Everyone has how-tos and ways to increase your sales – valiant and necessary stuff, of course! But what does your muse need? What does your work and your love of your art need to thrive? That’s where I want to help.

I aim to give artists ways to further hone their unique voice, increase their joy and productivity, and create a version of artistic success that is meaningful, satisfying, and anything but ordinary.

 

Come Join the Conversation

If you have something to share, would like to be a guest (for a chatty interview), or be a guest co-host (you and I banter on a particular subject) drop me an email me via my contact page on the show website: https://thesagearts.com/contact/ or send a voice mail (use the red button on that same site, bottom right corner of any page.)

And join me on social media!

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/thesageartspodcast/

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TheSageArtsPodcast

And don’t forget to click “FOLLOW” or that little arrow on your favorite Podcast player so you get notices of new episodes. New Episodes come out weekly on Friday evenings, barring natural disasters or other bits of interference, of course.  I hope you’ll join me there, on The Sage Arts podcast!

There are new artists and creatives joining every day with tons of great things to say…

 

“Just what I needed!” 

“I just binged-listened … and I can’t wait for more!” 

“There is so much validity in your presentation…” 

“Looking forward to all the thinking and creating that they prompt.” 

 

 

Taste test on my RSS website: https://rss.com/podcasts/thesagearts/

Or on the podcast home website: https://thesagearts.com/

Or start with this episode:

Formula for Color

August 9, 2020

Using both shades and tints of the same cyan-blue, Magdalena Buldak created a color palette that is predominatly monochormatic on the bottom but has the drama it’s complement at the top. Do you see how the cyan-blue leans heavier to cyan than blue? You could also say it’s cyan with a blue bias. Which you chose depends on what colors you have mix with. But being able to identify a hue+bias+tine/shade/tone allows you to see what you would need to mix those colors.

Did you get some practice in mixing and matching colors last week? Those proposed exercises are only the beginning of the possible uses of that formula I gave you: hue + bias + tone, shade, and/or tint =your target color.

The thing about last week’s post is that we talked about matching a color that you found out in the world but the formula also works for creating a color that you want to achieve even without a sample and it will also help you in choosing color palettes. I have limited time this weekend for you so we’ll get to palettes next week but let’s quickly talk about creating colors when you only have an idea of what you want and not a sample to go by.

A lot of times, especially when you are organically creating a palette at your worktable, you are making choices from the premixed materials that you have or you might have some idea of what you want. If you start with a prepackaged color you want and need to choose additional colors, don’t limit yourself to the colors on hand. Consider what would best go with it (and again that would be about palette choices which we will talk about next week but just go with me here) – is the main color you have chosen fully saturated or is it toned down? If you break down the color formula for your main color in the same way, you may discover that it’s not fully saturated or has a strong bias towards blue when you thought it would lean towards magenta or whatever.

Once you’ve broken down your main color, you can more accurately choose a complement, your range of analogous colors, or choose similarly toned down colors so the additions to your color palette don’t seem dramatically brighter.

If you are working with just the idea of a color, start with the hue you believe it would be a part of, look at the color really consider whether it should have a bias of one side or the other and whether it should be lighter, darker, or toned down. Start mixing your best guess and then, knowing what the formula includes, you can change the portion to make it more saturated or brighter, lighter or darker, or toned down more as needed.

The other reason you want to be able look at colors in terms of this formula is because when you put palettes together you’re going to be making them relate based on the details that formula lays out. I know that probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense right now but, trust me, looking at colors in terms of that will not only help you mix the colors you want but it will help you pick out color sets that will be more successful and satisfying for your intention.

So, for this week, either continue mixing color based on the formula or get yourself started so that you, ideally, can name the details of a color’s formula in moments. It’s cool to be able to rattle off Hue – Bias – Tint/Shade/Tone at glance. And will make you much more comfortable mixing your own colors as well as pairing them.

Get ready to dive into color choices next week. I think you will be surprised at how easy the method I have for putting together colors really is. So, keep mixing. Yes, it’s always practice, practice, practice. You have to do the work, of course, to gain the skill, but once you have it, it cannot be taken away from you to keep your eye on the prize!

And if any of you had trouble getting to that online mixer game, I know some people were getting error messages, so use this link here.

 

I’m still in Colorado but leaving to travel back on Tuesday. I’ll be out of touch most of Tuesday and Wednesday but will certainly see you back here next Sunday!

 

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If you appreciate the articles and the work put into presenting these for you, and you are in a good financial position, you can help support my work by purchasing publications on the website or you can contribute in a one-time or monthly capacity.

Thank you so much!

Ideally Unpredictable Color

August 2, 2020

The unpredictable but wonderful nature of color mixing shown with a transparent medium – alcohol ink. By LiquidEyesArt on Instagram.

How do you feel about the predictability of color? Do you think after everything you have learned these past 2 months that you can easily and predictably mix colors? I would guess you feel far more confident but don’t worry if you still feel a little uncertain. The fact is color mixing in the world of pigments will always have a level of uncertainty associated with it. It can be a tad frustrating but that is also part of the beauty of working with color –you learn to work with that uncertainty and embrace the beautiful and unexpected outcomes.

If you’ve been color mixing for any period of time you probably have a few colors that you came upon purely by accident and probably in the process of trying to create a different color. Keep those happy accidents in mind when you’re frustrated with creating the perfect mix of color. Also, if you have at all grasped the concepts we have discussed so far, you are leaps and bounds beyond what most self-taught artists, and even many formally educated artists, are able to do in terms of confident and successful color mixing.

That said, let me introduce you to the basis of this unpredictability so that in your color mixing practices, you will not get frustrated and blame it on a lack of knowledge or understanding. It’s not you. It’s pigment! We will then go on to do an exercise with a very predictable and fun tool. So, stick with me!

 

It’s Not You, It’s Pigment

If you remember from early last month, the characteristic of color is not easy to define in a kind of absolute manner the way a rock is hard or a liquid is fluid. Color is solely about the way our eyes take in reflected light. All the information we know about the color we are seen comes from the way light is reflected off of surfaces. Because of that, when the material that is reflecting the light changes in its density, transparency, dampness, texture, or whatever, it can change how the light is reflected off of it. That’s why a material can look like one color when it’s dry and something much darker, richer, or more saturated when it’s wet. The dampness changes the physical property of the surface so that changes how much light and what colors are being reflected back.

This is also true when there are differences between the pigments used in your materials. Let’s say you want to make green mixing a yellow and cyan. You can have two yellows that look to be the exact same color from two different brands (and sometimes even from the same brand) but even with mixing each with the exact same batch of cyan, you may very well end up with two different greens. That’s because the pigment in each of those yellows can be different (in the way they disperse or reflect or how dense they are) and so when they are mixed in what you think would be a predictable way, they may be a bit off.

Even though polymer clay is a more predictable medium when color mixing, color mixing tests can reveal surprising results and will allow you to learn a bit more about the vagaries of the brands and colors you work with. This is part of a series of tests Sabine Spiesser shared with me, complete with a grid to layout what was mixed with the base clay color so she could see how each color changed. It’s not always as expected.

Standard opaque polymer clays can be mixed with a fair amount of predictability based on the information you have learned over the past weeks. Mixing with opaque color materials (versus translucent materials like watercolor, inks, or glass) minimizes the differences that might be present in some of the clay’s pigments. I would try to explain this phenomenon but it practically takes a PhD in physics so just trust me that if you work in colored clays, acrylics, pastels or any other nontransparent colored materials you have it relatively easy.

If you do work with transparent such as inks or dyes, you cannot simply look at your colorants and determine how to mix them and get the color you want since concentrated transparent colors look different than when they are diluted or applied to a surface.

You’re probably all familiar with how weird it is to find that the liquid in a bottle of yellow food coloring or yellow alcohol ink is not yellow at all but some version of red to reddish-brown. That’s because the density of the pigment that, when diluted, reflects only yellow light, does not do so when concentrated. It reflects red and a few other colors they give it a deep muddy look. Crazy right? Well, if you have learned anything over the past couple months, you know pigment-based colors are crazy.

So, you could jump in and just mix up some polymer, using what you know to try to develop both simple and complex colors but that could take a lot of time and a lot of clay or paint. So, before you do that, I have a really fun way to test your color mixing skills in an “ideal” process. You have to promise me that you will keep in mind that this is not exactly how it will work with clay or paint (due to pigment strength as we learned last week and pigment variation and quality as I just mentioned), but it will tell you how well you have come to understand the concepts we’ve been learning and gives you way to practice without making a lot of mud.

 

Test Your Color Mixing Skills

Start by picking at least three relatively complex colors that you will aim to mix. The more colors you do, the better you will get at this but just start with three to begin with. Don’t pick anything too toned down or too muddy quite yet. Identifying hue and tone in khakis and browns can be a bit tricky so it would be best to work with something a little more saturated. I would not go too simple though. You know, don’t pick fully saturated examples of cyan, magenta, and yellow.

You can choose colors from existing objects you have access to, photos, images and magazines or books, color swatches, paint chips or whatever you have at hand, just not preferably something that you have on a digital medium because that is a lot harder to do this particular exercise using a sample from a screen.

Click to get a larger version

  1. Pull out your color wheel or, if you don’t have a color wheel, print one out from the color wheel here. If you are a subscriber to The Polymer Arts, and you have a print edition of the summer 2017 issue on color, there is a color wheel in there you can use. If you don’t have one and can’t print one out you can still do the exercise but it may be a little hard to compare colors as you’ll see.
  2. Hold up your color item/sample to the wheel and find the closest of the 12 hues to the object’s color. Jot down the name of the hue.
  3. Now, identify the color bias. Does the color lean at all to the right or left of the hue you identified? If so, what is the primary or secondary color in that direction. Jot down if you have identified a color bias one way or the other from the hue you started with.
  4. Is the color darker or lighter than the key hue? Make a note if it is darker, lighter, or similar in value than the key hue as identified on the color wheel.
  5. Does the color look toned down, looking slightly muddied or neutral, not necessarily due to it being darkened by black or lightened by white? Note if you think it is toned down by a complementary color.
  6. Now bring this all together: write it out as Hue+ bias +shade/tint+ tone (what color). For instance, an olive green would probably be green + yellow + shade + tone (magenta).

What we’ve done is identify a kind of template for breaking down a color in order to replicate it in color mixing. You could just grab your clay or paint and try to mix according to the recipe although you don’t have proportions yet. That takes practice to learn. And that can end up being a lot of clay or paint. So I have an imperfect but easy alternative for you to just play around with.

Mixing an olive green

At the link below, you will actually be mixing with light since it’s online and so it’s on your screen which only uses light, of course. But it does allow you to apply the concepts you’ve learned very quickly. Just keep in mind, the portions of color you mix here will not be the same you mix with artist materials, Just use this to play with the ideas of color mixing then go to materials after and test your skill there. Here’s the link: https://trycolors.com/

  1. To play this “game,” add portions of color by clicking the colored circle of the color you want to add or use the negative circle below it to take away portions.
  2. Take your little color recipe you identified from your first color and try adding in the primary hue in at least 4 portions then add the bias as one portion and then add the tint or shade and the tone as one portion each. You may not have your exact complement to tone it down with so either use the next closest color or put in one portion of each color that would constitute that complement. For instance, if you needed orange put in a portion of red and portion of yellow. If that is too much you can increase the key hue until you reach the amount it seems to be toned down to.
  3. Play with your proportions until you get close. Try to not just add them in all willy nilly. Ask yourself what you believe will work and if it doesn’t, take those portions back out and try again. You’ll learn more by understanding what exactly you chose that resulted in the various versions of the color you are after. Keep in mind, it might be hard to get it exact on the screen but you are just testing your knowledge.

Did you get close? Was that exciting or frustrating? If it was exciting, analyze and digitally mix your other 2 colors.

If you are a bit frustrated, perhaps you would like to be told whether you’re getting hot or cold. Play their color mixing game and there will be a little percentage counter telling you how close you are to matching the target color. You can choose from Easy, Normal, or Hard versions of the game using the tabs above the color blocks. https://trycolors.com/game/

After playing with this, do go and pick up your clay or paint and try this out with actual pigment. The color concepts for mixing will as you’ve learned it will result in better colors with the materials but the play time online should have really helped you think in terms of proportions, bias and the actual implementation of shade, tint and tone.

 

The Difference with Dyes: A little side note and bit of trivia

Hand dyed cotton fabric allowed artist allowed artist Janet Kurjan to embed the fabric with color that she could then cut and stitch without fear of it flaking off or cracking as many pigment based colorants might.

For those of you have worked with dyes, you may be wondering why I don’t differentiate between dyes and pigments since they are not technically the same thing although I refer to all this color mixing stuff as pigment based even while including dyes in this conversation. Why? One, because it’s simpler to use one term and I don’t know a better one, but also because the main difference between dyes and pigments is the size of the colorant particles. The smaller than water molecules of dyes can bond with water and so can be absorbed into material along with the water it is dispersed in while much larger pigment particles just float.

That differentiation does not have a significant bearing on what I’m trying to teach you so I don’t differentiate. And, besides, many dyes are processed into larger pigment sized particles to make them easier to work with in a lot of artistic processes. So, when I’m talking pigments, I’m basically talking about anything not included in light (RGB) color mixing theory. Cool?

 

Entering a Bumpy August

Well, we have flipped into a new month and I am still in Colorado. I have to say that this is one of the roughest things my family has gone through. It’s not that we haven’t had family members die but they tend to do so well into their 80s and 90s, not their early 50s. And we have never lost someone so well loved by everybody. He was one of the truly good guys. You literally couldn’t roast him for anything unless you wanted to complain about how much he cleaned. But I know how pretty much any woman would treasure that! I want to stamp my feet and scream that it’s just not fair. Instead, I tell my husband and my siblings that I love them dozens of times a day and we all are appreciating all we have so much more. The dude is making us all a better person even in his absence.

I do want to thank you all for your sweet notes and kind words. I may have a hard time keeping up with email this coming week so instead of writing me if you were so inclined, just tell the people you appreciate the most how much you treasure them and spread the love around.

This next weekend is our memorial for Jeff. It’s a strange affair with COVID sitting center stage with him in all the arrangements. It has been a very DIY kind of shin dig but luckily two of us in the family are or have been even planners, just not in a pandemic. So, the plans are keeping me busy which means I don’t know if I will be able to get a post out next weekend. I’ll try to find something to keep your color work moving forward or at least inspired, then we will get back to it on the 16th.

 

Do all take good care of yourselves and your nearest and dearest and have a bright and colorful week.

Strength in Colors

July 26, 2020

Understanding color strength in your materials becomes key to creating even gradations in blends like the one here in a bracelet by Jana Honnerova.

Are any of you having color information withdrawals after nearly 2 weeks since we’ve had the chance to chat about color? I did miss it myself! And I do apologize that I wasn’t able to post anything last week. I had hoped to at least post an explanation for my lack of an article but, unfortunately, it has been a very chaotic time in my family’s world and, honestly, I simply couldn’t focus enough to write. I’ll catch you up on my world at the end of this post for those of you who are interested but let’s talk color a bit first and get back on track.

Math versus Cooking

If you have been reading this blog since early June, you essentially have all the tools to successfully mix colors with control and confidence. At least in an ideal world. What I mean by that ominous statement is that the information you have does provide you with the basis for successful pigment based color mixing but now I am going to challenge you to take ideal information to an erratic and uncertain pigment world.

You see, the information I gave you appears, and in some circumstances is, pretty predictable. It’s practically math since you can, theoretically, determine that if you mix this much of one hue and that much of another hue, add a small portion of white, black, gray, or a complementary color to further tint, shade, or tone it, and you will get a specific predictable color. However, you are working with pigments. That is more like cooking where you work with a generic ingredient list, imprecise measuring tools, and primary components whose flavor and texture are subject to the whims of mother nature.

Our clays, paints, dyes, and inks may not be subject to mother nature but the manufacturing of these artistic ingredients are subject to product changes due to the availability of materials and fluctuations in quality, storage, age, and, of course, brands and lines within those brands. These variations will inevitably affect the characteristics of our color mixing materials.

I could tell you a lot more about the variations in materials and why they affect each other the way they do but I’m not going to do that at this moment. Right now, let’s just experiment with what we’ve learned and with the most dominant issue you run into as a result of these variations – color strength.

 

Knowing thy Material

One of the most basic things you will need to become familiar with in your materials is that some colors are much stronger than other colors when mixed. What I mean by this is that you can put equal parts of 2 different colors into a mix but when one is stronger than the other, it will dominate the mix and look like you put a lot more of that color in than the other. For instance, in a lot of art materials including polymer clay, darker colors tend to have more pigment and so when mixed with a lighter color, you can readily recognize the darker color but a lighter clay color may have less pigment or a lot of white in it so it gets kind of drowned out. More saturated colors tend to do the same thing, espeically when they are more saturated as well as darker than the other color it is being mixed with.

This is also often true between inexpensive and high-quality brands or lines. The manufactuers of an inexpensive line may use less pigment or poor quality colorants to help keep their costs down so they can offer the materials at a cheaper price. If you mix an inexpensive brand with a high-quality brand, you should not be surprised if you find the high quality one is generally stronger when mixing, espeically in colors of similar color value or saturation.

 

Getting Your Hands Colorfully Dirty

This week, I’m going to suggest that you try to become familiar with the stronger and weaker colors in your preferred brand and line of materials. This exercise assumes that you’re using opaque material such as clay or paint. The exercises work differently with translucent colors such as dyes and inks, which can get quite complex, so I would suggest you practice with only opaque materials for now. We’ll talk about translucent materials later.

Color Bias Chart

  1. Start by gathering a selection of colors. You can grab three primaries, three secondaries and black and white, or, if you’re ready for it, gather primary pairs based on the color biases we learned about in the last post. For bias pairs, pull 2 versions each of yellow, cyan, magenta. That means you’ll need a yellow that leans towards green and the other leaning towards orange, a cyan leaning towards blue and the other towards green, and a magenta that is more red while the other is more violet. You’ll want black and white as well.
  2. Then prepare your materials for mixing. If you’re using polymer clay, sheet each color in your pasta machine on the same thickness and cut with a single size punch cutter so that each “part” is one punch of clay. If you are working with paint, use approximately the same size daubs of paint and use them directly out of the tube or at least don’t dilute them.
  3. Start with just the black and white. Mix one-part white and one part black together. Mix them completely to get a gray.
  4. Pull out your grayscale or print the one here. (Click on the image to get a large version to print.) Check the resulting gray of your mix against the grayscale here.  I’m guessing it’s going to be pretty darn dark instead of a middle gray (5 on my chart). In general, black clay or paint has a ton of pigment which means you probably need a lot of white to make a middle gray.
  5. Try it again but this time use one part black and four parts white. Now, where does that land on the value scale? If it’s still not a middle gray, make another mix, changing the proportions to include more white or more black depending on whether it needs to be lighter or darker to reach a middle gray.
  6. What was the final proportions to get that middle value? Make note of that. Now you’ll have an idea of how much a bit of black can darken a color or how much white you’re going to need to lighten a color. Yes, it will take practice to get something exactly as you want it but just becoming familiar with the strength of your black versus your white will get you there a lot quicker as you move into tinted and shaded color mixes.
  7. Now, choose a yellow and your darkest color (that is not black) from the colors you gathered. It’ll probably be the cyan that leans towards violet or a blue. Do the same thing. Start by mixing the exact same amounts and see which color seems to dominate the mix. Chances are, it will be the darker one, although in some lines, there are some pretty strong yellows and some pretty weak blues. What did you come up with? Adjust your proportions and mix them again until you have a sample where neither one seems to dominate. How much of the weaker color did you need to acheive that?
  8. Finally, mix a set of secondary colors if you gathered primary color biased pairs to work with, or mix tertiary colors if you gathered a set of primary and secondary colors in your materials. (Review this post if needed.) See how much you need of one color versus the other to create a secondary or tertiary color that neither color you mixed with dominates. Make mental or actual notes on which colors dominate a mix.

As you do this, you will begin to become truly familiar with the strength of the colors in your material. This will be absolutely essential when we get down to masterful color mixing. It also will save you a lot of wasted materials, allowing you to mix small amounts that don’t end up being large amounts because you have to keep adding the weaker color to get it where you want. In fact, when you start mixing with unfamiliar colors or a new brand, do this exercise to become quickly familiar with the variations in colors. And if you end up with some really yummy new colors doing these exercises, save the sample and note the proportions so you can mix it for a future project!

 

Worst Year Ever

2020. Worst … year … ever. I’m just putting that out there. It started with friends getting choked out from the terrible fires in Australia, then there was the pandemic, then the economic fallout, then there were the not new but spotlighted tragedies that led to racial protests and riots, and now, closer to home, my family and I are trying to fathom our own personal tragedy.

Many of you who follow me on Facebook already have heard that we lost an important family member last week–a brother-in-law who my siblings and I grew up with. He was no less than a brother to us and he married the sister I consider my closest confidant. Theirs was the kind of relationship we always said the rest of us aspired to have and they were the two I came to in my darkest days. It just breaks my heart to think of him gone and to watch my sister and her kids as they try to comprehend this loss and rebuild their homelife without him. So, I am here with them in Colorado now, having driven through the night the Wednesday before last when his previously hopeful fight with cancer went suddenly very wrong. Now my siblings and I are just trying to help them ease into this awful new reality, in a world that is already so full of uncertainty and chaos. There is a lot to do. There is a lot to talk through. It has been, and will be, my priority for the next few weeks.

There is not much more to say at this point but I did want you to know why last week got missed and why there might be some irregularities in my posting and the answering of emails. I am still a one-woman business at this time, unable to hire anyone due to changes in California laws, not to mention the pandemic. So, while I do what I can for my family here, I can continue to fill orders and write these posts but timing might be a little off here and there. There is a comfort in the familiarity of writing these articles and dealing with day-to-day business things but there are definitely moments when the circumstances of our lives right now don’t allow for a regular schedule. I know you will forgive me if things get wonky and I thank you ahead of time for your understanding. I believe I will be back in California by mid-August and will figure out my new normal then.

 

I do hope you all are staying well, safe, and healthy and are caring for each other as best as we can in this crazy year.

So Much Color Bias

July 12, 2020

Have you ever tried to mix a color that seemed really straightforward, like mixing blue and yellow to make a nice green or blue and red to make a nice purple but it came out a bit muddy? It happens a lot with pigment-based art materials and the reason for this is something called color bias. Sounds kind of scientific, maybe even intimidating but it’s actually a very simple concept. Simple but exceedingly important. It may even be the most important concept to understand when it comes to mixing pigment-based art mediums.

So, what is color bias? It is a characteristic seen in a not quite exact hue that tells us what other hue it leans towards. In other words, you can call a particular color a yellow but if it is not a true yellow, the color bias characteristic identifies whether that yellow has a touch of cyan in it or a touch of magenta, because if it’s not just yellow then it’s going to have at least a touch of another primary, leading it away from that true yellow hue point on the color wheel.

It’s not too difficult to identify color bias, especially if you have a color wheel at hand. For example, a lot of people think turquoise is basically a cyan. It’s close but isn’t quite cyan. Look at a CMY color wheel and this example of the color turquoise. Do you think this turquoise has a touch more yellow or a touch more magenta than a true cyan? An easier way to determine this is to see if it’s closer to blue or closer to green on the color wheel. It should be pretty obvious that it leans closer to green. And green has cyan and yellow in it, right? Therefore, the turquoise must have a touch of yellow in it to make it lean towards green. The direction that it leans is its color bias.

Although it is important to realize which primary a color is leaning towards, since it’s easier to identify something that’s only a couple spots away on a 12 hue color wheel, identifying the bias of the primary color is usually described in terms of how close it is to the next secondary color. So, we would say that the turquoise is a cyan with a green color bias. Here’s a visual chart of color bias in colors that we would, on their own, name simply as yellow, magenta, are cyan, but the ones on the inner side of the circle are not true primary colors.

You can talk in terms of color bias with other hues besides primaries, but when it comes to color mixing, the concept is most important for your selection of primary colors that you choose to mix from. However, when we get to talking about identifying complex colors in order to mix them, (which I plan to get going on next week), determining the bias of secondaries becomes pretty essential. In other words, you can say a red has a yellow or magenta bias, but at that point you are identifying which of the primaries are dominant rather than thinking about which ones are added in since red has both yellow and magenta in it already.

 

Leaning on Color Bias for color mixing

Now why is this important? It takes us back to when you try to mix a color and it comes out a bit muddier than you expected or hoped. The reason is almost always due to one of your colors you were mixing with having an unfavorable color bias.

To explain that, I need you to think back to last week when we talked about toning down colors with complementary colors but, as I mentioned then, it didn’t always have to be its exact opposite, as long is that additional color added whatever primary was missing so that the resulting color actually had a little bit of all three primaries in it. In pigments, three primaries together make some version of a mud color so toning down is a way of making a color a tiny bit (or quite a bit) muddy.

Notice how the word mud is used to describe the combination of three primaries and also is typically the word used to describe a color mix that doesn’t come out as bright as you’d hoped? Well, it’s no coincidence. These two things are identifying the same concept. In both cases, the result is a color that includes some portion of all three primaries.

Let’s say you want to mix a nice, bright violet. Being quite comfortable with your CMY color basis, you optimistically grab a chunk of fully saturated magenta and a good pinch of a cyan and confidently mix them up, expecting a beautifully saturated violet. When it comes out looking like mauve and no adjustments to the proportions of the two colors get you your violet, you can absolutely conclude that one or both of the two primary colors you mixed with have a bias leaning towards the one missing primary – yellow.

At this point, you hold up your magenta to your color wheel and see if it leans more towards red or more towards blue. If it seems a true magenta or leans towards blue then it has no yellow in it and would not be the culprit. However, let’s say you conclude your magenta leans towards red. Sigh. Red trots away from magenta on the color wheel towards yellow so it has yellow in it.

But don’t conclude that it was just the magenta that was the problem. Pick up your cyan and see if it leans more towards green or more towards blue. If your cyan is looking a bit more like our notorious turquoise, meaning it has a green bias and therefore has a bit of yellow in it, you’ll know the yellow that toned down your planned violet color mix came from both of what you thought were true primaries.

This is extremely common in pigment-based mediums as it is very hard to create a true primary so you can just assume that most of the primary colors you choose in your art mediums will have a bias. Now, don’t think that means you are doomed to dull colors all the time. You’re not at all! Knowing this simply gives you back control. That turquoise, even though it is not a true cyan but a cyan with a green bias, will mix beautifully saturated greens with a yellow that itself has a green bias.

Plus, toning down colors is not at all a bad thing, not if that is what you are after. Colors that are toned down a bit tend to come across as more sophisticated and far more natural looking, as you can see in this pretty palette here. Now that you are aware of color bias, you can intentionally choose to mix a color from two primaries, one with the bias that leans towards the missing primary, and create a rich, but very slightly toned down color.

Understanding and identifying color bias will allow you to better anticipate the outcomes of your color mixes. It’s you taking color control!

Now, color bias does not help identify other things that desaturate a color, such as a tint (the addition of white) and shade (the addition of black) or toning resulting from the addition of gray (the addition of black and white) but were not going to go there quite yet. This idea of color bias is so important that it is the only thing I’m focusing on this week.

 

Name That Color Bias

So, I’m going to suggest that you focus on your color bias education the rest of the week and just simply ask yourself what the color bias is in any color you see that you like that you are inspired by, that you want to use in your studio, or even in your attire or home decorations. And you can do this with any color. Just identify the color as a primary or a secondary then ask yourself which way it is leaning.

In fact, look at the tertiary colors on your color wheel. Many of them have an easily identified color bias primarily because their bias is in their name. Look at yellow-green for instance. If someone showed you a shirt that color, what would you call it? You’d probably just call it green. And yes, it is green with a yellow color bias.

So do the same kind of thing with any color you come across. If the color pops in between two of our 12 color wheel colors, just pick the primary or secondary color in that pair of colors you feel it would be wedge between and name it that color with its color bias. For instance, if you found a color that lands right between violet and blue on the CMY color wheel, call it blue (a secondary color) with a magenta bias.

If the colors you are trying to identify are heavily toned down or seem to be tinted or shaded, if you have the Color Wheel Company’s CMY wheel turned over and use the shade and tint samples to find the hue on the color wheel.

For instance, the key hue of a peach color might be hard to identify until you look at the tinted versions of orange and red. The tinted oranges look a bit peachy but not quite. It certainly doesn’t lean towards the tinted yellows but it looks a touch like the tinted reds so it’s key hue land somewhere between orange and red. In this case, we will call it a red with a yellow bias. Or you can you call it an orange with a red bias since, in a lot of our minds, orange is a secondary (from our previous RYB view of color) even though it is not on the CMY wheel.

It is not so important that you identify things according to them being primary or secondary – that’s just to keep it simple for you right now. It’s far more important that you train your eye to see that colors tend not to conveniently fall into just one of those 12 identified hues on the color wheel.

So, grab your color wheel or print one out and take it around the house or studio with you and start working on your bias. The good colorful kind!

 

A Bunch of Notes

That was really the whole the lesson but there are some things that I want to bring up in case that conversation presented you wtih up some questions or difficulties. These won’t be of concern to you all but there are some interesting tidbits that others might find of interest as well.

Color Deficiencies

I hate to think of anyone being frustrated trying to learn colors. Up to this point we’ve been dealing with some pretty straightforward color concepts but color bias, a simple concept as it really is, it can be very difficult for people who have any level of color deficiency (also referred to, in its extreme, as color blindness.)

So, if you find you are having a lot of difficulty identifying color bias, you may want to see if you have any sight issues with color. There are tests online like this one that can give you an idea if this is an issue:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/are-you-actually-color-blind

If you find you have any issues, speak to an optometrist. There are some corrective lenses that can help some people or they may think there is an underlying condition that, once treated, may reduce the issue, or keep it from getting worse.

Don’t worry if you have some color sight issues. You can, of course, still make art. Some really big artists have been color blind. Claude Monet, of all people, was colorblind later in life! He had to label all his paints to know what to use. Luckily, our art materials come labeled these days!

What’s about Warm and Cool for Color Mixing?

If you have had color training before, you may have heard of these leanings I’ve talked about this week as warm or cool versions of primary and secondary colors. That is the traditional terminology but I always found that so confusing so I teach it using the other name for it – color bias. However, if you’ve already learned color bias in terms of warm and cool, I’m not going to dissuade you of its usefulness but keep in mind that in my teaching of color concepts and color mixing, I will reserve the talk of warm and cool for choosing color palettes.

About Your Choice of Color Primaries

Throughout these articles I refer to CMY as the color basis for the primary colors we work with mostly because it would be far too confusing to include both CMY and RYB in these conversations even though I promised you could continue to use RYB. And you still can.

Now, if you want to stick with RYB (red, yellow, blue) that, by the definition of primaries, will be saying that red and blue cannot be mixed from other colors. But if you are going to work with CMY, then cyan and magenta are primaries instead which would mean that cyan and magenta can’t be mixed from other colors. How can it be possible that red and blue as well as cyan and magenta can be considered primaries which are defined as hues that can’t be mixed from other colors? Are there really five primary colors? Or is the definition wrong?

Ack! How confusing!

Strangely enough, the definition is not incorrect and you can’t work with five primary colors. You will always need to work with only three. I know. It doesn’t seem right.

The fact is, either set can work but one tends to work better than the other especially with certain materials. With natural pigments, RYB may actually work better primarily because most lines of paint colors were developed to support RYB. The reason this happened is that, back in the day, when all pigments were taken from nature, there were not really any natural pigments that were pure enough to show what the purest hues actually were. They came close with particular versions of red, yellow, and blue. Modern-day chemistry now provides us with a pure cyan and magenta that allows us to work with pigments based on the science of light and color which is why I encourage CMY as the color basis from which you work. However, tradition has led makers of conventional artist’s mediums to create colors based on the older, classic pigment paints although some of that is starting to change and you can find versions of cyan and magenta in usually at least one line of a particular artist medium.

Understanding this and the conversation we just had about color bias, I think it becomes rather apparent that CYM mixes will give you the best options for brighter colors plus better color mixing control, even when making toned down and neutral colors. But if you want to stick with RYB – just think red instead of magenta and blue instead of cyan and then work off of a RYB color wheel. Otherwise, the concepts were pretty much the same.

 

Where are all the Pics?

Okay, I have to run. I apologize that there aren’t nearly so many pieces of art as examples this week. It’s been a difficult week for my family and getting work done was not always my priority. In have two very close family members that are having particularly difficult health battles, one which got quite bad this week. We remain optimistic but it has been rough.

Neither of these loved one’s health issues are directly related to this pandemic, but the complications of trying to ensure they don’t get sick is certainly not helpful. This is part of the reason I’ve been asking that people think about wearing masks as signs of caring. When you have someone – or several someones – that you love who you know are almost certain to die if they catch this virus, the wearing of a mask really feels like a matter of life or death, and when others will do so to be supportive of people they don’t even know, it’s nothing less than heroism.

So, please, be one of our heros. If it has been recommendedwhere you live, and you are at all able, wear a mask when you’re out. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

 

Support This Blog!

If you appreciate the articles and the work put into presenting these for you, and you are in a good financial position, you can help support my work by purchasing publications on the website or you can contribute in a one-time or monthly capacity.

The sale is still on for books and past Virtual Art Boxes so you can get that special pricing on publications as well! 20% off all books and 25% off VABs.

I’ve got some special extras in the works for my monetary contributors to show you how appreciative I am of your generosity! You all are amazing. Check in next week for more info on those bonuses. Thank you so much!

 

 

Colorfully Related

July 5, 2020

 

Vera of Handmade Blossom employs all major hues in this Rainbow Roses pendant.

How comfortable are you feeling about the terminology learned last week? Feel secure in your understanding of values, saturation, tints, shades, and tones? I do hope so because I am going to throw more terminology at you today but, thankfully, these will be pretty familiar to a lot of you although you might have felt uncertain or confused about them previously. For some of you, this will be brand-new which is super exciting and, in a way, it will be much easier for you to take it in, unencumbered by any previous confusion.

These concepts are standard color theory points within the old RYB color set that are also used when using CMY as the primaries. (If you don’t know about the RYB versus CMY situation please take a look at the post “Not the Hue You Know”. It’s a really interesting article, if I do say so myself!)

 

A wheel to reference as you read. Click to enlarge and open in another window.

Familial Color Relationships

So, if you have been reading my free posted lessons since the beginning of June, you have heard me talk about primary and secondary colors. These terms describe the relationship between colors but if you are going to get the most out of what you’ve been learning, you will need to know about a few more relationships that will be useful for both color mixing and choosing color palettes.

There are three standard terms used to define a kind of hierarchical order among hues that I think resemble a family. You can think of primaries as the elders, secondaries as their children, and tertiaries as their grandchildren.

Primary colors are the colors that cannot be mixed using other colors. On the color wheel we will be using, those three are Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. Since, every color can be mixed from these three (this actually depends on the medium but let’s just go with it for now), they are extremely important and so are at the top of this hierarchy.

Secondary colors are those mixed using two primaries. On the CMY color wheel that is Red, Green, and Blue.

Tertiary colors are those made by mixing a primary and one of its two nearby secondary colors. These include yellow-green, green-cyan, blue-cyan, violet, red-magenta, and orange. You can see the predominance of hyphenated word descriptors for these colors but violet and orange have single word names since they were used on the RYB color wheel that was so prevalent for so many years as well as being identified wavelengths in the scientific world.

Now, for you purple lovers, let me make a side comment. I know, most of us are used to thinking and saying that purple comes between blue and magenta (or red) but purple is not actually a hue. The reason has to do with the light spectrum and the cones in our eyes and all kinds of scientific stuff I don’t think we need to get into. I did start talking in terms of purple earlier in the series of articles but that isn’t technically correct and because so many of you are now working off the CMY color wheel I recommended, and it refers to the color between magenta and blue as violet, I’m going to use the color name violet so as to not confuse too many people and because that really is the correct name.

So, these three types of hues – primaries (of which there are 3), secondaries (of which there are also 3), and tertiaries (of which there are 6) – do not, by far, encompass all the possible hues out there. They do, however, designate 12 useful portions of a color wheel that we can readily work with to identify color relationships necessary to the mixing and choosing of colors.

That was easy, right?

 

Color Combination Relations

Okay, so we just defined the metaphorical familial relationships between hues. Now, I want to talk about a different kind of relationship– the relationship between combinations of colors. We can think of these as cliques of friends. Just as some people get along with certain other people much better, certain colors get along with other colors much better. This is true for color palettes as well as for color mixing although maybe for color mixing we should think of it as team of coworkers where you put people (colors) together depending on what you need. Are my metaphors making any sense? I can only hope.

I’ll start you would just three color combination relationships – complementary, analogous, and split complementary. There are a number of other commonly used color relationships that fall under the friends/coworkers metaphor such as triads, tetrads, and squares but those won’t be important until we hit color palettes so we won’t muddle up your poor little brains with all that just yet. Plus, these are the only three that knee consideration in both palettes and mixing.

Complementary colors are those that are across the color wheel from each other. They are considered opposites and, if mixed together, they will include all three primaries in varying degrees. This is why compliments “tone” each other down instead of just creating a new hue as discussed last week. If you’re scratching your head, just look at the color wheel and look at any two complementary colors. Jot down what primary colors would make each of them and you’ll find that list would include one of each primary. You can also see the primaries included in each color on the outside edge of the Color Wheel Company’s color wheel.

Complementary violet and yellow-green are used in this polymer and gold ring by An Fen Kuo.

 

Analogous colors are those next to each other on the color wheel. Choosing 3-5 (out of our 12) colors in a row make for a harmonious color scheme.

Analogous range from green to yellow in this set by Jana Lehmann.

 

Split complementary colors refer to a color on that is next to a particular color’s complement.

Metal and enamel brooch by Marks Alexander with a blue cyan and its split complementaries of red and yellow

 

Now, why are these relationships important?

I am going to refer to these color relationships quite a bit when we get to color mixing and color palettes but let’s look at a bit of color mixing as a kind of demonstration. Don’t worry if this doesn’t sink in immediately. We will be going over this in more depth later. I have discovered in teaching that presenting the same thing several times in several different ways, especially over time, can really drive an idea home. So, here’s kind of a taster and then we will look delve into this again in the coming weeks.

Let’s say you’d like to make an olive green. You could just grab a green out of the bin an add a touch of black to it to make it darker and more neutral, right? Well, yes, you could but is it the olive you want? You may find that it still looks awfully, well, green, more like dark leaves than army jacket.

Below is a selectin of olive greens. Hold up the color wheel next to them. I think you’ll see that there is quite a bit of yellow in an olive green. Because of that, if the green you chose to start your color mixing is heavy on the cyan (leans towards blue) it will be hard to get to a satisfactory olive with just black. This is where prepackaged, already mixed, colors can be troublesome to mix with. I think you will find that mixing your own green, cyan and yellow, going heavy on the yellow, and then adding a bit of black will get you a nicer olive green.

If you want to get fancy with the color mixing, you might also try a touch of violet or magenta to “tone” down the color instead of depending wholly on the black to do it.

Now let’s see if things I have been saying are sticking with you. Look at the color wheel and then try to surmise why I suggested violet or magenta. What do you think?

Well, if you remember from last week’s discussion about tones, at mixing a little bit of a complementary color is what gives you a toned down color. So, violet works since it is the complement of a yellow-green but you can also use a color’s split compliments to tone it down which is one of the two reasons I suggested magenta as an option.

Perhaps you’ve put together the reason why this works from my earlier comment about why compliments tone things down. It’s because “toning down” is really all about the addition of the missing primary color that isn’t in the color you’re trying to tone down. Because of that, you can use any color that includes the missing primary, not just the complementary color.

So, a yellow-green has cyan and yellow in it but does not have any magenta in the mix, right? Therefore, you can actually tone it down with anything from orange to that indigo blue you see on the CMY color wheel. But why did I suggest magenta rather than violet? Well, I was thinking that maybe we don’t want to add too much more cyan to that olive green, in order to preserve more of that yellow in the yellow-green hue, and both violet and indigo blue have cyan in it. So, if you add a touch of magenta you, preserve more of the yellow. Of course, if you are yellow-green is yellower than you want, go for violator indigo. That will tone down the yellow a bit.

Here is another question for all you smarty-pants… Why do you think black, as discussed last week, is an option for toning down a color?

The answer is in what black is made of. If remember from way back in the first article in June, with pigments, black is the inclusion of all primary colors. So, if you had black, you are technically adding a missing primary to your color no matter what the color is. Right?

Isn’t it really cool how there is usually some pretty simple underlying reasoning behind all these color rules? Or maybe it’s just me. I always want to know why something works. If I know why I can remember it, use it, and abuse it as needed.

So, are you beginning to see why you would need to be familiar with where colors fall on the color wheel and how their relationships will inform your color mixing choices? Also knowing about these relationships makes remembering things like compliments easier – the complement to a primary is always a secondary and vice versa, and the complement of a tertiary color is always another tertiary. Easy stuff!

Explore Your Favorite Color Relationships

This week, if you want to explore these ideas further, just grab your color wheel (or view it here) and spend some lazy time looking it over and discovering more about how particular colors relate.

For instance, are you surprised the complement to red is cyan and not green? Orange and cyan blue actually are pretty familiar, aren’t they? And that indigo blue on the wheel is not so far off from purple so the purple-yellow complement combination you might have been acquainted with from the RYB color wheel also feels comfortably familiar.

Find a set or two of three analogous colors that have high contrast. Even though they are all next each other on the color wheel, that doesn’t mean they have the same or similar values, nor does it mean that it needs to look basically monochromatic. Can you find some analogous color combinations you like, ones that you might use in an upcoming project?

Find the key hue for some of your favorite color pairs. Are they complements? Or are they more of a split complement? Maybe you are into analogous colors? For instance, one of my favorite combos is royal purple and forest green. Those are violet and green key hues and are therefore a split complement.

Split compliments are actually really great pairings, especially in situations where you want color contrast but maybe not the drama of complete opposites. Identify a few more split complementary pairs on the color wheel that you find appealing.

 

Okay, I will leave you with this swirl of color information taking over your brain. Keep identifying colors you see around you, naming them as primary, secondary or tertiary colors so that, as we move along, the conversations we have will be easily and quickly grasped. Also, have fun finding color pairs out in the world or while you’re playing at your studio table, and again, identify them, when relevant (because there are other color combinations we haven’t hit on yet), as complementary, analogous, or split complementary. Because, next week, we start getting serious about mixing!

 

Support This Blog!

If you appreciate the articles and the work put into presenting these for you, and you are in a good financial position, you can help support my work by purchasing publications on the website or you can contribute in a one-time or monthly capacity.

The sale is still on for books and past Virtual Art Boxes so you can get that special pricing on publications as well! 20% off all books and 25% off VABs.

I’m trying to work up some special extras for my monetary contributors to show you how appreciative I am of your generosity! You all are amazing. Thank you so much!

 

 

The Keys to Color

June 28, 2020

Lampwork beads by Pikalda Phuengpong

Have you noticed that, in art, very few things exist or are created in a vacuum? In other words, every choice you make has an effect on all the other choices you have made or will make when designing and creating original works of art. So, if you are coming to my blog for the first time, you may want to read the last three weeks of posts first because each successive article builds off the last.

Last week we talked about color value and this week we’re going to talk about how you can change the value along with something called saturation. This will be a little heavy on terminology but it’s easy stuff and by the time you’re done reading, you will have quite the sophisticated color vocabulary.

I also want to speak for just a moment on the reason you would want to do this deep dive into color and design. Whether you create your own colors or simply choose colors from pre-mixed options, your choices are best ruled by your understanding of the characteristics of color. Of course, understanding color characteristics is essential in color mixing but choosing and identifying color requires the same knowledge especially when creating color palettes, analyzing your work (or the work of others), and correcting or improving your color choices.

Working with color, like anything else in design, is about the relationship between colors and between all the design elements. In design, we work with likeness and disparity. That’s really what all relationships are about, aren’t they? Think about your spouse or your best friend or the coworkers you like to hang around with. You have something in common, some area of your life that overlaps that you can share. But you also have differences. These differences make the relationship interesting, encourages curiosity and conversation, and allows each of you to fulfill different roles in the relationship. That’s how design works as well, including between colors.

So, if you keep in mind that these conversations are about those design relationships, I think you’ll start to see just how useful and essential these immersive color lessons are regardless of whether you makes your own colors, pick available colors, or simply want a better understanding of the art that you enjoy.

Saturation is Not Value

Now, let’s talk about value versus saturation. For some reason, these two concepts get confused a lot even though they are quite different. As you learned last week, value is the lightness or darkness of a color. Saturation, however, is about how intense the color is or how close it is to the unadulterated hue or “key” color, at least in regard to pigment. (This is dealt with a little bit differently when it comes to mixing light in RGB. Just thought you ought to know that in case you come across a definition that talks about saturation, brightness, and luminosity. That’s RGB stuff.)

 

So, let’s take a pure blue as an example of both high saturation and dark value. Take a look at the color wheel. True blue, in its most saturated and vivid form there on the outside ring of the color wheel, is far darker than pure yellow. You could make that blue as light in value as yellow by adding a lot of white to it but that would also change its saturation because the addition of white takes away from the purity of the hue, right? The addition of white in a color is called tint.

Now let’s take that yellow. If you wanted it to be as dark in value as the blue, you could add a lot of black, so much so that it would probably look gray with little yellow to be gleaned. This would both darken the value and desaturate it, a lot. The addition of black to a color is known as shade.

So that’s the thing with adding black or white to a color. It will desaturate a color but it also will make it lighter or darker in value. I bet that doesn’t fully clarify why value and saturation are so different since adding white or black changes the lightness or darkness (value) as well as the intensity of a color (saturation). Well, here’s the thing – you can, on the other hand, change the saturation without changing the value, just not with black or white.

Let’s look at the color red for moment. On the CMY color wheel, you can see that opposite red is cyan. They look to be about the same midrange color value, right? If you add a bit of cyan to the red that will reduce the saturation or purity of the red by altering its hue but it will not make a noticeable change to its value. If you got yourself one of those CMY color wheels, you’ll see on the front side there that each ring getting closer to the center shows what happens when you add 10%, 20%, 30%, or 40% of each hue’s complementary color. That kind of mix tones down the color which is why it is called a tone.

You can also tone down a color without changing its value by adding a gray that is the same value as the color. In fact, a fully desaturated color would be just gray. Or you can mix in a lighter or darker gray to make the color lighter or darker while toning it down but without muddying the key with its complement. A gray mixed with a color is also called tone.

So, you see, changing saturation can, but does not always, change value but changing the value will necessarily change the saturation of a hue, making it less pure. This is true for color mixing or even using digital photo editing (and is why I warned you last week not to use saturation options in photo editing to look at values in grayscale, because value is not taken into account.)

 

Your Bright, New, Shiny Color Vocabulary

Congratulations! You probably didn’t realize it but you just completed a major step in your color education. If you’ve read all the posts, you have learned (or refreshed your understanding of) the three most important aspects of color – Hue, Value, and Saturation.

And, now, with this article, you’ve come to know the three primary ways to change a color. Let’s review because it’s kind of cool to realize how much you’ve soaked up.

The three primary characteristics of color:

Hue – the key and name of a color.

Value – the lightness or darkness of a color.

Saturation – how pure or how adulterated a color is due to the addition of white, black, gray or a complementary color.

The three primary ways of adjusting color in pigments:

Tint – the addition of white to a color.

Shade – the addition of black to a color.

Tone – the addition of gray or a complementary hue to a color.

Look at that! You have six color terms that are going to help you tremendously in color mixing, choosing palettes, and analyzing work. But let’s spend a little more time with those last three just to be sure you got them well seated in your creative little brains.

 

Color Quiz

Okay, let’s put your new knowledge to the test. Take a look at the opening image and the images below and find the pure hue (just visually – you don’t have to name it) and then determine the variation of that hue was accomplished with tints, shades, and/or tone. We’ll chat about them after you have a chance to come up with your own thoughts.

Carved wooden vessel by Louise Hibbert

 

A polymer bracelet by Judy Belcher.

 

Well, what did you come up with? Some of these examples are not so straightforward but I find them very interesting.

First of all, Pikalda’s glass beads that open this post have a saturated blue as its key color while the other color variations, aside from the black and white accents, are the key blue with white added so they are tinted versions of the key color. Pretty easy to see that, right?

With Louise Hibbert’s wooden vessel, the key is a kind of violet and, I’m sure you guessed it, the gradation to the nearly black tips is the result of adding black, in other words, creating shades of the hue. But there are also diluted versions of the hue where she lets the wood show through towards the center. Is that a tint because it makes it lighter or a tone becuase it isn’t quite white that has been added?

Well, think in terms of the color elements here. Since the violet color is translucent, it visually mixes with the color of the wood, a pale cream, which is a tint of yellow. This actually makes that diluted violet a tone because the change in color is not due to the addition of just white or just black and it’s a color that muddies the key color even if just a little. It’s true that yellow is not the direct complement of violet – that would be a yellow-green – but you can actually tone down a color with something close to its complement too. We’ll get more into those complexities when we get deeper into color mixing so you can just stash that info away for later if you like.

Now, in Judy Belcher’s bracelet, it gets even a bit more complicated because, in truth, the fully saturated hue is not present. That would be bright lime green but the key color has been toned down with variations of gray. In fact, the entire bracelet is a series of lime green tones with nothng else but some white. Some tones are due to a very light gray addition, others to a few different middle grays and the darkest green would be a tone with a dark gray. Being able to spot the key in something like this takes practice but not a lot. It might just take the following little exercises.

 

For Further Study

Okay, so there are a couple ways you can further concrete your, hopefully, not too hard-earned knowledge. These are both fun and easy and take 10-15 minutes each to do.

Color Wheel Studies

First of all, if you bought yourself that CMY color wheel I suggested – or even if you didn’t – you can see tones, tints and shades set up on this handy color tool with approximate percentages that one would mix to achieve these colors from a key. Here is a video that the Color Wheel Company put together to explain how to use their color wheel tool while making note of where these items are on it so you can familiarize yourself with them just by looking over your color wheel. Clicking on the image takes you to the purchase page but scroll down to find the videos.

Isn’t crazy just how much information they put on this little paper tool? Keep in mind that those percentages for the tones, tints and shades are approximate because in the real world, our materials have varying amounts of pigment so adding 10% of one complement to a color could make a dramatic change while adding 10% of a complement to another color may make almost no change. You’ll start to get a sense of the stronger and weaker colors (and brands) if you do the exercise below and as we work through color mixing in July.

 

Mix it Up

Studying the color wheel is an easy and quick way to see the difference between tone, tint, and shade but the best way to not only remember the terminology and what it means but to really understand how saturation, tint, shade, and tone work in color is to mix it up.

So, grab some clay in one fully saturated key color. Pick your favorite or grab one of the primaries – cyan, magenta, or yellow. You also need a bit of your chosen color’s complement plus black and white. Roll out each clay on your thickest pasta machine setting and, using a single punch cutter, punch out portions of clay from each sheet. (You can also do this with paint – you won’t be “punching” out your portions but, instead, you’ll be picking up dabs of paint.)

  1. At the top of a piece of paper, write Tint, Shade, Complement Tone, and Gray Tone as column headers
  2. Put one portion of your key color under each column header. This will be a starting point for each color as we desaturate it.
  3. Punch out two portions of your key color and mix it with two portions of white until well mixed. Sheet the clay and punch out one portion of this mix. Put it under the tint column with space enough between it and the key color for another portion.
  4. Take one of those mixed portions and one of the key color and mix that. Punch a portion out of this new mix and place it between the previous mix and the key color.
  5. Take the last portion of the first mix and mix it with a portion of white. Punch out a portion of this very light mix and line it up in the column under the middle mix, followed by a portion of whites to complete a column of tints from key color to white.

At this point you have three desaturated tint versions of the key color. These are not a lot of steps between the key color and white but it will give you an idea of what white does to a fully saturated color. If you are game before creating a wider range of this tint sampler, you can double the amount for each of the three mixes we just did so you can mix additional portions and create four more steps, one between each of the five portions in the tint column.

  1. Now go through the exact same process, creating 3 or 7 mixes, as you prefer, but instead of white …
    1. … make a column using black to build a range under the Shade header. You may want to use 2-3 times as much key color as black for your middle shade to get a better gradation since black is very strong, as you can see in my example. I used twice as much key color and all the mixes are still awfully dark.
    2. … use the complementary color to create a range under the Complementary Tone column.
    3. … mix a gray (I used twice as much white as black to get my middle gray) to add to the key color to create a range under the Gray Tone column.

You will probably notice, as you mix, that sometimes the progression from the key color to the color you mix in is not very even or regular. For instance, if your key color is particularly dark in value such as the Ultramarine blue, the jump between the last mix and white may seem quite a bit different, like it could use another mix in between. You are, of course, welcome to change up the portions of color in your mixes to make a more regularly graduated range. This will, however, demonstrate that the amount of pigment in different colors of clay and between brands can differ and so some colors will dominate in a mix. You’ll need to use more of the weaker color to make the range gradations more even. But making a perfectly graduated range is not the purpose of this exercise. The idea is that you make the mixes, see the changes in color, and associated with the terminology.

Now why am I so adamant about you learning the terminology? Well, in July, as we learn about color mixing and palette choices, being able to verbalize the common and contrasting characteristics in a set of colors will be key to making beautiful, intentional color choices. Plus, you can impress friends, family, and complete strangers with sophisticated color banter!

So, relax and mix up some colors. It’s easy and often surprising how the colors come out. I have found more than one “new favorite color” doing these kinds of exercises. You just might find a inspiring new color or two as well!

 

Wondering about my references to Intention? Or how to support this content?

If you enjoy these articles, you can help me keep the lights on by making a purchase of any of the publications I have on the Tenth Muse Arts website or by making a one-time or monthly contribution here.

Read the set of articles on Intention in the February edition of the Virtual Art Box or catch up on the concept of marks, lines, and shape with a purchase of one or more of the original Virtual Art Box offerings. They are all on SALE, 25% off right now – no promo code needed. I have also put all books on sale at 20% off for the next couple weeks so it’s a great time to fill up your library.

Your purchases help support this free content as well as giving you a stronger base for the conversations we will have going forward.

If your budget doesn’t allow such support, that’s perfectly okay. I just hope this is supporting your creative journey giving you more joy in your work. if it does, just let people know this is freely available so I can support even more folks.

 

My Weird Low Pressure Week

Hopefully there aren’t too many mistakes here. I need to beg your forgiveness if there are. My brain has literally been shorted as I gave blood this past week and got tested to see if I am a antibody plasma donor candidate to help out COVID-19 patients but my naturally very low blood pressue has yet to recover so I feel very dingy and am sometimes dizzy still, 5 days later. I never could give blood in Colorado due to the high elevation and even lower blood pressure up there but they thought I’d be fine down here. Well, guess not. We learn something new all the time!

So, I probably can’t give plasma eithere but I am still going to do all I can during this rough time to help others and, as part of that, maybe you will allow me to ask a little favor. I know this has gotten a little political here in the states but thsi is not about politics … I would just like to ask that when you are out, and it has been recommended where you live, you can show your love and concern for your community by the simple act of wearing a mask. I wear one everywhere even though I’ve already had this bug so I am supposedly immune and can’t pass it on. But people are scared and worried and wearing a mask shows you care, even if you question the validity of the science that says it will save others from getting sick. We need all the consideration and caring we can put out there right now, don’t you think?

Ok, that is my public service announcement for the day. I hope you are all staying well and will find joy in a creative and colorful week!

 

The Need for Light and Dark

 

Libby Mills uses value in color to create drama and depth with a mostly monochrome color palette.

I planned on talking about color variation this week but then it occurred to me, that we will need to talk about color contrast and you can’t talk about contrasting color without talking about value. So, I switched up my plans and we’re going to talk about the often neglected concept of color’s lights and darks, otherwise known as value.

The Light and Dark of It

So, what exactly is value? Value is simply what I just mentioned – the lightness or darkness of a color. This has nothing to do with their hue. Remember, hue works more like a category so mint green and hunter green both are a green hue, but mint has a light color value while hunter green has a very dark value.

The most important thing to remember about value is that it used to create contrast. For instance, purple has a much darker value than yellow, right? Used together, they are high in value contrast and, so, make a rather dramatic color palette. On the other hand, a dark magenta and forest green will have the same or similar middle-dark value. Putting them together will not create much value contrast. Although there is nothing wrong with that – they belong to complementary (opposite) hues on the CMY color wheel so they have contrast there – the lack of value contrast greatly reduces the potential of their dramatic contrast in hues.

To be blunt, similar values in rich colors such as dark magenta and forest green would just be boring. Now, if you choose a slightly darker magenta and a lighter green such as a burgundy and an jade, that will increase the value contrast and make a much more interesting color combination, as seen in the example image here. Below the color combinations you see them with the hue removed, leaving just their gray value. So that’s another way you can think about value – it’s the lightness or the darkness of the color without any color in it.

 

Seeing the Value

If you are a painter you might be shaking your head at the simplicity of the above explanation so let’s get a bit more precise. (If your head is already spinning a bit, just read through this but don’t worry about understanding it fully yet. You can come back to this later.)

Value is not just the lightness or darkness of a color. It is the lightness or darkness of what is SEEN. That’s an important distinction because the color of things we are looking at out in the world won’t stay constant as the light changes.

For instance, have you ever been around someone in a restaurant or on a train – some poorly lighted space – thinking their hair is dark brown only to see them step outside and find that it’s a rich red? Their hair didn’t change color. The light did.

The less light there is, the darker things appear, right? That seems obvious, but it’s really important to consciously understand that. It underlines one of the primary principles about creating art, especially imagery you’re trying to reproduce in any realistic manner – it’s not about what you think something is, it’s about what you actually see. So, if you are painting a portrait of me in a dark room, you would not paint me with the bright henna red and copper hair you know I have, because in the dim light, my hair would not actually look red or copper.

You may not be a painter but if you plan to build images in canes or are painting with polymer or create pretty much anything where you are developing a two-dimensional illusion of form and depth , you will be working with these kinds of value changes in color. Even if you don’t create imagery, the concept of how light changes the value of a color is useful for understanding what value is and why it is important in your designs.

You’ve actually learned about the importance of value if you’ve ever tried to draw a ball – to make it look round you have a very light spot where light hits the sphere directly, a dark side where the light doesn’t reach, and a gradation from light to dark between the two. Now, if that ball had color, like the blue ball you see here, you can tell that it’s a solid blue ball even though it actually has a variety of blues in this rendering of it. But I couldn’t just fill in a circle with one shade of blue and have you understand it is a ball. We need to see that change in color value – the swatches pulled from the blue ball are all the same hue of blue but are all different values – in order to see a dimensional form.

Without those changes of value – those lights and darks, those highlights and shadows – everything would just look flat. That is also why you don’t want to take a photo of an object with the light shining directly on the front facing view – it will kill the shadows, eliminate value changes, and make it difficult to perceive its form.

 

Intentional Value

So, a change in color value provides us with visual information, right? We like that. We like to be able to perceive if something is round or flat, textured or smooth. The contrast between light and shadow gives us that information. It is one of the reasons that we look for (mostly unconsciously) the contrast in value in works of art as well. Contrast, or the lack of it, can tell us a great deal.

In these beads by Jennifer Morris, there is very little contrast in value but these are not about drama so it makes sense. There are muted and pale colors with feminine floral motifs on round forms with low value contrast to match. The intention for this to be soft and quiet is obvious and with all the characteristics servicing that intention, she has designed some very lovely beads.

On the other hand, here are liquid polymer painted pieces by Lynn Yuhr who is clearly going for a bold and graphic look with wide ranging color values to support that objective.

So, don’t think that you must have a high contrast in the value of your colors. It can be high or low depending on what will best serve your intention. Value contrast also can bring attention to certain portions of your work or lead your eye around the piece.

For example, the fish on this clock by Gera Scott Chandler are much lighter in value than the background, bringing our focus to them first. The light value of the circles on the background subtly connect to the larger fish since they are similar in value so that your eye moves from fish to circles, going around the face of the clock.

 

Furthering Your Color Consciousness

So, before I get into how to manipulate values – something we will get into next week – I suggest you spend some time getting familiar with the values of color. I have a couple suggestions for you.

Go Grayscale

To better familiarize yourself with the actual value of colors, I find it helpful to look at colors in grayscale. A grayscale image will show you the actual value of colors, relative to the colors they are grouped with.

This means taking photos of your work in “black and white” mode or changing color images (yours or other people’s if you want) to grayscale in a photo editing app or software. Not all cameras have a black and white (or grayscale) mode. If you’re not sure, look up your camera model online along with “how to shoot black and white” and if no information comes up, then it probably doesn’t have that option.

The other way to do this is to edit the image. To do this on your computer, use Photoshop or whatever default photo editing software is available on your computer.

  • In standard Photoshop, go to Image> Mode> Grayscale.
  • In Microsoft Paint.net, you go to Adjustments> Black and White.
  • If you are using another program, search the web for “how to convert image to grayscale” along with the name of your editing program.*

If you take a picture with a mobile device, you can usually edit it to grayscale directly in the phone or tablet.

  • On an iPhone or iPad, select an image, hit “Edit”, tap the three overlapping circles icon, then scroll the little thumbnails of the photo over until it is in “mono”. Tap “Done” if you want to save it but keep in mind it will save over the original. If you do this accidentally, just follow the same steps and you’ll find the original version in that little row of thumbnails so you can convert it back.
  • In Android, and pretty much any mobile device, you can use Google photos. Open your image in this app, tap it to bring up the icons and choose the three stacked lines. Slide the thumbnails over until it is in “Vogue” mode. You can also save it and undo it later.

*Note: There are quite a number of articles online suggesting you convert an image to grayscale by using a “saturation” adjustment. DO NOT do that for this value exercise. As we will discuss next week, saturation has nothing to do with color value. Reducing saturation tends to also reduce value, more for some colors than others. It will completely mess you up. You need a conversion to “grayscale”, “black and white”, or “mono”.

If using software and apps is just too much of a bother or you don’t have a software program, here is a free online service. You just click the file icon, browse to and open the file, and it will appear in the browser window in grayscale. You can save it from there by hitting the floppy disk icon.

Once you have these grayscale images, start looking at how much value contrast shows in the images.

  • Is there a lot of contrast or all the values fairly close?
  • Does the amount of value contrast match with the probable intention or feel of the piece?
  • Do any of the colors set next to each other just blend into one another because the values are so close? If so, do you think that works for the piece or do you think more value contrast could help it? (We’ll talk more next week about how to choose alterantives when you want a different value.)

Just make yourself more familiar with value. You can also use this value scale (click on it, then print it out) to check values of colors or pieces you have. You can lay the scale next to a color and see which value you think is the closest. Then take a photo of the scale next to the color, convert it to grayscale, and see how close you came to matching the color to the right  value. Do this a few times and you’ll be seeing in values quite quickly!

 

Get a CMY Color Wheel

You know how I recommended you get a CMY color wheel? Well, the more I work on these articles, the more I wish you ALL had the CMY color wheel from the Color Wheel company. I can’t tell you how many times I reference mine, and I am convinced that when we get into how to use these color concepts to pick color palettes and to mix color, having this particular CMY color wheel will make it all such a breeze.

No, they’re not paying me to push this. I have met the owners and they are a fantastic little family company (who worked with the polymer community’s very own Maggie Maggio to help build a CMY based grade school art curriculum, by the way) but more than that, they are so intensely passionate about color and education. That’s why they’ve done such a superior job with this particular color wheel.

So, if you haven’t gotten one yet, you can buy it directly from the company for $9 (including shipping in the US) and you will have it within 5-7 business days. It’ll be the best $9 you ever invested for your creative journey. Outside the US, I am not sure where it is best to get them but you can search for “Color Wheel Co CMY” and look for this wheel:

https://colorwheelco.com/buy-now/product/cmy-primary-mixing-wheel-7-3-4-diameter/

 

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this immersive in value. I have to say I am always surprised at how much there is to talk about each characteristic of color. These articles really could be much shorter but I don’t know if you would walk away really understanding and feeling confident about these concepts. We retain concepts better when we spend some time with them. I’m hoping these articles do that for you! If you have any thoughts or suggestions about the length or detail of these articles, I am always up for hearing them. Just reply to this if you get it by email or write me through the website. 

 

Wondering about my references to Intention? Or how to support this content?

Read what so many VAB members have said was a life altering (or game changing or mind opening) set of articles on Intention in the February edition of the Virtual Art Box and catch up on the concept of marks, lines, and shape too. And they are all on SALE, 25% off right now – no promo code needed. I’m also having a 20% off sale on ALL books!

The purchase of a box would help support this free content that I am creating now as well as give you a stronger base for the conversations we will be having going forward. You can help me keep the lights on by making a purchase of any of the publications I have on the Tenth Muse Arts website or by making a one-time or monthly contribution here.

Thank you for your past, present, and future support!

Connected to Color

June 14, 2020

Cornelia Brockstedt communicates her sense of each season through color sets (cones and the cord) that speak to her idea of Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter.

So, here we go with the second installment of this summer’s color adventure. If you didn’t read last week’s posts, you can find it here. That post really lays the foundation for a lot of what I’ll be talking about over the next few weeks so you might want to read or review that first.

This week I want to expand upon your knowledge of hues but, more particularly I want to talk about the expressive nature of color. I know last week I may have forced a shift in your thinking about primaries but to confirm that and as a way to connect last week’s post with this one, let’s ride this CMY train a bit farther down the tracks.

Hopefully, we are now all in agreement that the most accurate pigment based primary colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow. That is particularly helpful to keep in mind when mixing but that hardly gives us enough categories to work from in order to have a sense of how colors communicates or how to choose color palettes. I would like you to add a few more, starting with the CMY secondaries – the colors that result from mixing two primaries together – red, green, and blue.

Hmm. RGB, you say? Doesn’t that sound familiar? If you remember from last week, RGB are the primary colors for mixing light (such as the light that creates images on any digital screen.) Yes, CMY’s secondaries are the primary colors used to mix with light. And the reverse is true – CMY is the secondary color set for RGB. Why do you think they are interrelated like that?

You may remember from last week’s post that RGB is considered an additive color while CMY is subtractive so it’s not surprising to find them as opposite sets on the same color wheel. This is not the same RYB color wheel that painters have been using for years, mind you, so if you have a color wheel that depends on bread, yellow, blue, you might want to either get a CMY color wheel like this one by the Color Wheel Company. Or use a CMY color diagram like this one below. (Note that colors in this image below will shift if you print it and may be off due to your display already. Also the percentages listed are just guidelines when mixing colors as quality and concentration of pigments between types of materials and brands can differ greatly.)

Click for full size and to print. Created by SW Pryor, 2009

 

Back to color categories. Right now, you have six – cyan, magenta, yellow, red, green, and blue. How about we add four more for a nice even 10?

Since the majority of the art world has been working with red, yellow, and blue as primaries for the last 200 years, their secondary hues have been widely referred to in color psychology and communication. Those are green (which we already have), purple and orange. Purple and orange carry very particular associations so we can’t leave them out.

The other two I feel necessary to include are black and white. For the sake of simplicity, I’m not going to wander into the mire that is the argument about whether these are actually colors. I think that argument is really based in the one inarguable fact – they aren’t hues. Depending on the color mode, either black or white is the inclusion of all hues or the exclusion of all hues but the argument on whether they are colors is just semantics so for our purposes I am proclaiming them color categories.

 

Connecting in Color

Now, why is it important to have categories? Well, you have to realize you’re going to be communicating something specific with the colors you choose so it’s best to choose with intention. Having color categories and knowing their specific association gives you a base from which to begin making those kinds of decisions.

We all react to color on some level, so color choices are no small thing. For instance, if there are a set of sisters who are triplets, all dressed the same but one has fire engine red fingernails another cobalt blue fingernails and the third has sunshine yellow, do you not draw different conclusions about each of the women? The one with a red nails might come across as strong but conservative, the one with the blue may strike you as audacious or even rebellious, and the sister with yellow nails may seem carefree and funky. You might draw a different conclusion that I did but I’m guessing we’d agree that we would think of each of those women at least a little differently based solely on the fingernail color.

Strangely, those conclusions I made about the fingernail colors are not necessarily associations common with those specific colors but that’s our curveball here. It goes to show that it’s not just the color that creates what you are communicating – it’s also the context. And you.

Since there is a lot more to communicating with color than what we might assume is inherent in each hue, I’m going to give you very general associations as a kind of jumping off point, but you may very well have other strong associations not listed for these colors. We’ll get to that in a moment.

For now, simply read through this list but don’t try to memorize it. Just let it sink in as you read it, maybe just asking yourself what associations are true for you that I have listed, and mentally (or in writing) adding your own as you go. Then I have some thoughts about how to use these categories for your own authentic creations.

 

Color Associations by Color Category

Here are the color categories we’ll work on for now. We’ll get to the grayed out sections later.

 

Magenta – uplifting, balancing, and cheerful, this color can convey and encourage happiness, creativity, and compassion.

Purple – often thought of as the color of luxury and grandeur due to its historical rarity, it is now also associated with drama, ambition, and dignity. Purple also encourages daydreaming which may be why it is associated with mysticism and imagination.

Blue – one of the most liked colors in the world, blues can feel uplifting, quiet, calm, and reliable, as well as communicating trustworthiness and comfort.

Cyan – lively but calming, cyan invokes the serenity and brightness of tropical oceans along with a sense of cleanliness and focus.

Green – relaxing and reassuring, green is a very positive color that is easy on the eye, literally. It lessens glare and absorbs ultraviolet light reducing eye fatigue. It also represents growth, freshness, nature, and harmony although in certain contexts and tones it can also be associated with illness.

Yellow – considered the happiest of colors this is associated with joy, optimism, and spontaneity. It is visually dominant which means it can drown out other colors, so it is often used in small amounts or as a background color.

Orange – energizing, cheerful, and friendly, orange literally wakes us up by encouraging oxygen intake in the brain. It is also highly visible which is why it is used for construction and warning signs even though emotionally it feels playful.

Red – well-known as representing love, passion, power, and excitement, it is also associated with danger and blood. It also appears hot so much so that a beverage will seem hotter in a red cup than any other color. It is also the most eye-catching, so it gets noticed regardless of how little is used.

Black – is often associated with death but in the absence of a context with death associated symbols and imagery, it will more likely convey authority, respect, seriousness, and decorum while sometimes feeling aggressive. It can make objects appear deeper or heavier than light or white versions.

White – purity, cleanliness, goodness, and innocence are the more common associations with white although it can also be thought of as formal, cold, sterile, and stark. When it is not a dominant color, it is overlooked, reading as an inconspicuous background.

Now, you might be asking, what about brown? Or gray? How about pink? Yes, we do have very specific associations with those colors, but they are variations on hues, not hues themselves and I am aiming to give you baby steps, more or less. Trying to figure out how you feel about 10 colors is a pretty big baby step already. We’ll get to the rest in future weeks.

 

Real and Authentic Color

Okay, now that I you’ve read that list, let’s talk about the only color associations that really matters – your specific emotional connection to color.

Choosing the colors you want to use to communicate your intention really should be based on what you feel, not what you THINK, about those colors. This can be tough to figure out but if you’re up for it that’s what I’ll suggest you work on this week. Let me explain.

Take the color blue. It supposed to be calming, peaceful, and trustworthy and is one of the favorite colors of all times. Well, strangely, I myself have a kind of aversion to the hue of blue. It’s not all blues, but I certainly steer away from it when it comes to my attire. Other than maybe a pair of blue jeans on a back shelf, there is no blue in my closet. I know I associate dark blue clothing with domineering personalities (my father wore a lot of navy, for instance) so I don’t find it comforting or uplifting like many people might.

So, if I wanted to create a piece that portrayed a peaceful calm, I would not choose blue even though that is supposed to readily communicate that concept to others. It would be like trying to laugh at something I didn’t find funny. It will come across as inauthentic. However, I might go with green or even cyan as a dominant color because those colors do feel peaceful to me. That choice, combined with my other design choices, all rooted in my personal intention to convey a peaceful calm, should result in a cohesive and authentic feeling piece.

I know you might be concerned that choices based on your personal associations won’t communicate well to a lot of people. It is true – it might not. But for the right people, the people that will love and feel connected to the authentic you they see in your work, it absolutely will. It will also be a more joyful and satisfying piece to create for you.

 

Connection and Context

You might’ve noticed my persistent use of the word “connection”. I’m using this as a kind of catch all term for the various objectives an artist might have for drawing people to their work. Sometimes we want people to feel drawn to, and therefore connected to, the work on a personal level so that they want to buy it. Or we may be more concerned about captivating them in order to elicit a specific emotion or to get them to think, which is another kind of connection.

You can also have the objective of not trying to connect to others at all but may simply want to please yourself, which is wonderful and more than valid. In that case, it is even more important to make design choices based on how they make you feel than about what they mean to others. Even though you’re communicating with only yourself initially, the authenticity of your choices will communicate and connect to others if and when you share your work. Personally, I think this is the best way to work.

If you haven’t already noticed, everything in design is about relationships. Although the relationship between your artwork and the viewer is one relationship, I am more specifically referring to how every design element is related to each other in a piece to create an overall feel or message. Your choice of color, as strong as it can be in relaying a specific message on its own, relates to the other design elements which can change how the color and the overall design feels.

Look at these two pendants by Melanie Muir. They are using essentially the same color palette, but they have a notably different feel. For those of you who were with me last month, or bought the May VAB about shape, you might have readily recognized how the softer, round shapes of the left pendant has helped create an inviting and fun feel in that pendant. Yes, orange is associated with a sense of joy to start with but then look at the one on the right. It still has a burnt orange with black and white palette but the sharp corners of those shapes make it feel more serious although still lively due to the orange.

 

Here is another comparison with two different color palettes but the same design by Christine Dumont. Do they not feel quite different? Even though I like the core design, I am more drawn to the blue-green (yes, even though I am not big on blue.) I am a huge fan of green and I don’t think of domineering men when blue is combined with it. It actually feels uplifting and comfortable to me. The magenta, a color known to be particularly cheerful, is quite elegant here but feels too loud for me. That’s probably because I am essentially an introvert so although I like my attire to be creative, edgy, and even weird, I don’t like it to be loud.

Which do you prefer and why do you think that is?

 

 

Exploring Your Version of Hues

So, if I haven’t fully confused you by giving you a set of rules and then telling you to toss them out window, I would suggest that, this week, you spend time investigating how you feel about particular colors.

Now, how do you figure that out? Well, honestly, it’s going to take a lot longer than a week for most people if you’ve not done this before, but you can start by simply making word associations and becoming more aware of your reaction to color.

Wrapped in Color Exercises

Try to put yourself in a place, physically or mentally, where you can respond to color that surrounds you.

Go and put on different colors of clothing, wrap yourself in various colored blankets, or, if you have a stash of fabric, pull out some solid colored bits and wrap yourself up in them. Then ask yourself how you feel in each color, especially if you can do this in front of a mirror (you know, when everybody else is out for a walk or asleep or something so you don’t have to explain yourself.) What colors make you feel more energized? What colors make you feel more relaxed? Do any of them make you particularly happy or make you feel regal?

Since you are likely to be wrapping yourself up with colors that are not a pure hue, you could start making note of how you react to the hues when they are dark, pastel, bright, or muted. You may be responding to that version of the hue, not the hue itself. Like I might feel very bold and confident in a plum dress, but I would probably feel a bit subdued and delicate in a lavender one. (More on color variations next week.)

If you don’t have sufficient colors to wrap yourself up in, just try to imagine yourself in a room painted all in one hue. How do you feel in the yellow room? Does it make you want to dance around or is it annoying? How about a red room? Does it make you feel impassioned and energized or maybe frightened? How about a white room? How about a black room?

You aren’t really trying to make any specific conclusions about your relationship with color at this time. Just try and become more familiar with how you feel about various colors. Color relationships are complex. Like I love using copper polymer when making jewelry, but I can’t imagine ever creating anything with orange. Orange just doesn’t speak to the things I want to express. But you should know, I also hate tomatoes but love salsa so, I’m probably just particularly weird.

As we work through the various aspects of color over the next few weeks, you can continue to ask yourself these questions about how you feel about particular colors. And when you are designing, you could also ask yourself what color comes to mind when thinking about the emotion associated with the specific intention of the piece you’re working on. You might be surprised with what you come up with.

 

Wondering about my references to Intention? Or how to support this content?

Read what so many VAB members have said was a life altering (or game changing or mind opening) set of articles on Intention in the February edition of the Virtual Art Box and catch up on the concept of marks, lines, and shape too. And they are all on SALE, 25% off right now – no promo code needed.

The purchase of a box would help support this free content that I am creating now as well as give you a stronger base for the conversations we will be having going forward.

If you enjoy these articles, you can help me keep the lights on by making a purchase of any of the publications I have on the Tenth Muse Arts website or by making a one-time or monthly contribution here.

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Not the Hue You Know

Amber Elledge used Premo’s fuchsia, cobalt, zinc yellow and white to mix all these brilliant colors.  www.facebook.com/starlessclay/

Welcome to the first week of the new incarnation of the Virtual Art Box. I’m not going to continue referring to it as such since the contents will be spread out over the weeks instead of packaged (boxed) but for those of you who have been with me since the inception of the VAB, know that you’ll get the same design lessons and ideas to improve your skills and artistic knowledge that you had when you were getting this as part of the VAB membership. For those of you who have only been joining me for the weekly blog, you’re in for quite the treat if you have any curiosity and desire to further understand how design works in creating craft.

I think you’ll be delighted to know that were going to start this new iteration of the VAB focused on color. I knew the color content couldn’t be just one article and a few nudges though. Nope. Color is far too multifaceted. It is easily the most nuanced and intricate of all design elements. I could spend the rest of the year just talking about color. I mean, just think about it … is there any other design element for which entire books are written? And so many? Well, not that I know of.

But it’s not just that there is a lot to talk about with color. The reason there are so many books, classes, and websites about color is because it can be difficult to learn. Part of it is, of course, the complexity of color, but it is also because it takes some time to understand why some colors work together and some don’t and why mixing color can be so hit and miss. In other words, it takes work to understand color. Not everybody wants to put in a lot of work on this and I understand that, but if you do make the effort, the reward will be tremendous!

Your mission, if you choose to accept it … is up to you.

My approach to teaching design for most of the past decade has been based on the concept of osmosis and I don’t plan on changing that overmuch. So, I’m going to tell you about the concepts and show you examples and encourage you to look at the world around you in terms of those new (or maybe not so new) ideas. If you read the blog every week, these concepts will eventually just sink in. It might take some time but you’ll get there. On the other hand, put a bit of work in now and you’ll be masterfully mixing color and creating gorgeous color palettes by the end of the summer!

So that’s my proposal. I’m going to teach you color over the next couple months and you can just observe and soak it up or roll up your sleeves and get hands-on, as and when it suits you. But if you keep up with even just the reading, you’ll be steps ahead of where you are now come the fall.

Deal? Okay, so let’s start with a real basic, rather convoluted, but surprisingly fascinating concept – hue, the basis of all color.

 

Jan Montarsi, Mica mush pendant created with gold polymer and the cyan, magenta and yellow equivalents in alcohol ink (Pinata’s Senorita magenta, Baja blue, and Sunbright yellow.) www.flickr.com/photos/jembox/

It’s Up to Hue

Hue is what most people think of first when they think of color and color theory – that which makes up the purest aspect of color. Scientifically speaking, each hue is a particular point on the color spectrum, but I think it’s best to think of hue as a category. Red is not just fire engine red, right? It’s also brick and burgundy and rose. It’s a range, a grouping that we use to organize the myriad options we have in color.

Why think of the names of pure color as categories? Because each of those categories represent a specific set of things to us. Our response to color is primarily determined by our culture but all colors make some level of emotional and psychological connection which, as creatives, we can use to communicate to the viewer of our work. Every one of the infinite number of colors available to us has its own specific response but it is certainly easier to start by understanding the characteristics of just a few categories each defining a specific range of color. You can then grow your knowledge from there.

So, I thought I’d have you learn a handful of color categories based on pure color hues for the purpose of communication in your work but I also need you to understand hue in terms of how you mix colors. Unfortunately, categories and mixing are not based on the same concepts so we are going to have to learn those separately. You see, while categories are about defining our response to color, mixing is based on science. In other words, one is based on an ever-changing landscape of personal and cultural understandings while the other is rooted in physics.

So, let’s start with science and look at the meaning of categories later. Mind you, this conversation may feel like a roller coaster at moments but buckle up and I think you’ll be surprised at what you’ll learn. At the very least, I have some surprising trivia not to mention a thrilling new position from which to work with color.

 

True Colors

Color theory, especially for visual creatives, really starts with the concept of primaries. Primaries are known as non-reducible colors because, by definition, they can’t be created from other colors. Strangely enough though, you won’t find just one set of primary hues that you can or need to work from. So, you see how color confusion starts from the beginning. Let me break it down for you and make it simple.

If you go by the definition of primaries being colors that can’t be created by other colors, then there are just two primary sets, one for each of the two different materials from which color can be created – light and pigment. Mixing light is used to create visuals on your computer screen or dramatic lighting on a theater stage, while pigment is what gives any object its color including colorants that give paint, chalk, clay, etc. their color. Both light and pigment primaries are based on the same thing – the spectrum of colors in the range of natural light that our eyes take in.

When mixing light, the three primaries used are red, green, and blue (a.k.a. RGB, that color mode digital photo editing software is always yammering on about). From those three, you can mix up any color of light you want but put all three together and you get white because white is the full light spectrum, like the sunlight. For that reason, RGB is known as an “additive” color model because you add parts of the spectrum to create a color of light for your eyes to take in.

Pigments, on the other hand, reflect just parts of the light spectrum back to our eyes (so if the pigment reflects only yellow, that’s what reaches our eyes and we see yellow) while absorbing the rest of the spectrum, effectively removing that part of the light that hit it the object from being reflected to our eyes. Because of this, pigment colors are referred to as subtractive color because we only see what’s left. Mix three completely pure pigment primaries and you end up with black which is the absence of light—those pigments collectively are able to absorb all parts of the light spectrum.

I know this is getting a little scientific but I just want you to have a basis for understanding why the colors on your computer screen can look so much different than colors in your physical world or in print. The additive versus subtractive properties of the two-color modes just don’t translate back and forth very well. That should take some of the pressure off of you though. Now you know that it’s not just you that can’t re-create any color in pigment based materials from something on-screen or your photographic skills alone aren’t what makes it so hard to take a digital photo with accurate colors. It’s just a crazy, mixed up color world.

Now to the truly mind-boggling stuff.

 

As far as pigment goes, most people have long been taught that the pigment primaries are red, yellow, and blue (RYB) even though there is no scientific basis for it. It’s just something a variety of Europeans arbitrarily developed based on the pigments they had available between the 17th and 19th centuries. And it worked, more or less, with paint. Oddly enough, around the same time, science was slowly coming to the conclusion that cyan, magenta, and yellow (CMY) are more precise primary colors for pigments but colorists in the art world didn’t consult the science of color physics. Plus, it wouldn’t be until the early 20th century that chemistry would provide the pure pigments needed to properly create visual work in CMY.

The more precise primaries were readily adopted by the printing industry in the early 1900s since this produced the brightest and broadest range of colors, but it was too late for western society’s language of, and associations with, color. Artists, designers, and psychologists had already established language and research including categories (yes, the categories we’ll be looking at) based on RYB. So, we are presently stuck with RYB when it comes to categories and communication. However, there is still a strong argument for learning and using CMY.

 

The Case for the Late Bloomers

If you are open to mixing with cyan, magenta, and yellow, you’ll likely find your color mixing is easier to predict and more saturated than through the use of RYB mixing. Just as the printing industry did. However, not all mediums for all brands make it easy to work in CMY versus RYB. In polymer, some brands are geared to CMY (such as Fimo Professional and Pardo), others seem to favor RYB (such as Kato and Cernit) while others aren’t geared to color mixing at all (such as Sculpey Souffle).

I, myself, have long been a convert to the CMY primary basis for mixing pigments of any kind but as a publisher, I’ve spent years working with printers which now uses CMY, plus “key”. (Key is black, as in black is the key plate that adds the detail in color printing’s four plate printing process, which is why print color is referred to as CMYK.) So, it wasn’t hard to break through the old lessons of RYB. And then there is the simple science – contrary to popular belief, red and blue can be mixed from other colors. I bet many of you find that hard to believe. Well, it’s not hard to prove. Here is the proof from my studio table:

Here are two sets of primaries and my mixes for their secondaries using the clay color on either side of them. I have Fimo in CMY with red, green and blue secondaries and Premo using RYB with green, purple and orange secondary mixes. I chose these sets in large part because that’s what I had on hand but also because Fimo set up the professional line based on CMY (although they call their cyan True Blue), and Premo has long supported RYB with their ultramarine blue, cadmium red, and cadmium yellow.

Note how much brighter and more saturated the CMY secondary colors I mixed are. Relative to the primaries, the mixes are neither toned down (losing saturation or purity) or darkened. The RYB delivers a decent orange but the green is quite toned down and dark and the purple looks practically black even though I went very heavy on the red and it’s nearly a wine color.

But here is what should really convince you that CMY mixing knowledge is something you need in your toolbox. Here is the same red and blue from the Fimo mix next to the blue and red Premo. Now do you believe that red and blue aren’t primaries that can’t be mixed from other colors?

Did that blow your mind a little bit? Do you feel the need for a glass of wine or comforting cup of tea? I remember when I first mixed blue and red from a CMY set of colors. I felt like I’d been duped all these years! But don’t take my word (or my pictures) for it. Try some of this color voodoo yourself.

 

Exercising Your Hues

This is a very simple exercise that will take you maybe 15 minutes but could be life changing for your color mixing skills. Like everything in art, skill is not about what your hands do but rather how you see things. I would ask that you see how this color mixing works with your own eyes and learn how the color in your preferred material and brand work depending on the primaries you choose to work with.

  1. Find a set of CMY and RYB in your clays, paints, inks or whatever you’d like to work with. You can even try a couple different mediums since the mediums act differently as well.

Here is a chart Maggie Maggio put together for the primaries of 3 major polymer clay brands to give you a guide for choosing primaries from your available clay colors. This was from an article titled, “21st Century Color” in the Winter 2015 – Hidden issue of The Polymer Arts, which talks more about the use of CMY for color mixing if you are only fascinated now.

  1. Once you have your two sets of primaries, just mix the following:
  • Mix secondaries for CMY: red, blue, and green.
  • Mix secondaries for RYB: orange, purple, and green.

I won’t be able to tell you how much you need to mix of each color to get those secondaries since every brand is different but you can start with equal amounts of both primaries, maybe adding a bit more of the lighter of the two. In my experience, yellow colorants are not as intense so you need more of it while blues (but not cyan) and magenta’s (and sometimes reds) can be quite intense. Just mix a small amount and then add what you need to adjust to what you think is a middle ground.

  1. Now, using the CMY set, create an orange and a purple:
  • For orange, start with two parts magenta and one part yellow then adjust to make a satisfactory orange midway between the yellow and the CMY’s secondary red.
  • For purple, start with two parts magenta and one part cyan then adjust to get a purple/violet midway between magenta and the CMY’s secondary blue.
  1. And lastly, try and create a cyan and magenta from the RYB set.
  • For cyan, start with two parts blue and one part yellow then adjust to make a color midway between the blue and green.
  • For magenta, start with two parts red and one part blue then adjust to get a color midway betweenpurple and red.

Which set of these were most successful? Of course, I expect the CMY to make those secondaries easily but the RYB results could go either way, depending on the RYB colors you used.

Also compare the orange and purple from the CMY set to the RYB set. Which do you prefer? And what have you learned that you didn’t expect?

They’re all good and useful colors no matter what they are mixed from. I find that mixing with RYB lend itself well to organic color palettes since those old primaries basically have a built in neutralizer (the addition of a complementary color) since they aren’t pure hues. That keeps the mixes from feeling too bright or artificial. But when I want bright, I stick with CMY or find a pre-made color that’s close so I only have to add tiny amounts of another color if it needs any tweaking.

Are you more comfortable with the idea of working with CMY primary hues? Really, all you’re doing is switching up your blue and red a tad from the old classic trio. Favor a blue that leans slightly towards green rather than purple and a red that leans some towards hot pink. It’s just a slight shift on the color wheel. It does, however, help if you use a CMY color wheel since magentas and cyans don’t sit equidistant from yellow on an RYB color wheel. Here is one you can print off for now.

Original graphic by DanPMK at English Wikipedia.

Using a different wheel will also help with things we’ll be talking about next week – secondary, tertiary, and complementary colors. But don’t fret. The CMY color wheels work the same as RYB but they’ll give you new and exciting color palette combinations to contemplate. So, if you can spend the week playing with and getting used to the idea of a little CMY into your life, you will have just added and organized an entire arsenal of color mixing that you didn’t have before. How wild is that?

If you do the color mixing exercises, I would absolutely love to see photos of your results and thoughts from you. Please let me know what brands and colors you used and how you felt about your results. If I get enough, I’ll share them next week or on my social media pages if you give me permission. Send them to me directly by responding to this if you get this by email or by going to the website here.

Can You Help?

I’ll try not to be too overt about asking for support but like every business, there are non-negotiable costs, mostly services that help get content to you. So, if you like the content and are able to help keep me going, pop over to the shop and pick up books and back issues missing from your library, gift a publication to a struggling polymer friend (I’ll include a card or can even sign the publication – leave instructions in the “Order notes” section after the shipping address), or contribute any amount you wish with the contribute options here. Also, patronize my advertisers –they do help spread the word about what I’m doing as well as funding some of what I do.

Otherwise, I hope you simply enjoy the learning. Have a colorful week!

Iconic Shapes

May 31, 2020

If there was a shape that could represent state of the world today, what would you say that is? Chances are, you’re thinking of something that works as an icon or symbol rather than something as simple as a circle or octagon. Abstract shapes are something I touched upon only briefly in the article about shape and form at the beginning of the month. They are most commonly created for things that we are already familiar with, many of which are considered universal. Some have been with us for ages such as stars, teardrops, and hearts, but simplified shapes will pop up whenever a quick method of communication that is not language dependent is needed or preferred.

For instance, right now, a square with half circles on the ends, often with a few horizontal lines in the square, represents a medical mask. Such an icon may have meant nothing to you at the start of this year but it’s hard not to recognize it for what it is now.

That is the power of abstract shapes. With minimal characteristics, these shapes represent an object if not an entire concept. For this reason, I suggest you to not use them too frivolously. If you pop a heart shape on something, it should be because your intention necessitates calling on the viewer’s emotions rather than just putting it on to be cute. Now, I’m not saying that using hearts to be cute is a bad thing but realize that people will see it as an emotional expression. And I say emotional, not love, because the heart represents a base positive emotion associated with love, caring, and happiness but if your heart shape has a hole in it, is cracked or torn, or is jet black, the viewer will start thinking of things like loneliness, sadness, or even animosity.

Not all abstract shapes have such a wide range of potential meaning but many can elicit a similar or even  stronger reaction, such as the shape of a cross or particular types of star shapes, depending on the context in which it’s used.

If you want to use abstract shapes but do not want to be so obvious or bring up the more common associations, you might find it useful to combine abstract shapes or to use them in unexpected ways. This approach to the use of abstract shapes can make for a much more subtle or complex statement which means your viewer will probably react more viscerally even with a readily recognized shape since its associations won’t be so blunt.

Here are just a few examples of abstract shapes where the association with them has been toned down.

Here, Elsie Smith overlays the impression of leaf forms on heart shapes showing just how perfectly they fit together. Pairing these makes the heart a gentle emotional background to the focus on, and apparent love of, nature’s intricate leaf formations.

 

This next one is a really good synergy of recognizable abstract shapes. Speaking in terms of the silhouette of the piece below as well as the focal point of the opening image, we could see a sunburst, a starburst, or a flower shape. Since Zuda Gay Pease was primarily creating flowers at the time she created this, we can assume her intention was for it to be a flower, but the energy of all those many pointed tips makes it come across as celestial. So, we get a combined association – the femininity and beauty of the floral shape with the energy and excitement of bursting light. It’s quite an impressive mix.

 

It’s interesting that practically all types of celestial bodies have a recognizable abstract shape (or variations of them.) There is probably nothing quite so common in abstract celestial shapes as a crescent moon. Our association with it can be fairly wide ranging from simply symbolizing the quiet and dark of night to embodying the ebb and flow of life.

In this example, I found it very curious that the lines on these crescents appear to be sun symbols with all their brilliant energy, and the bright blue ends of the crescent, visually truncating the shape, make us less likely to think crescent moon than simply an angular and curvy shape. The moon and its mysteries therefore become a quiet background to the louder energy of the colors and lines. I really like this contrast of concepts here as the sun and the blue color brings in a liveliness while the unconscious reaction to the moon shape is a quiet but divergent undertow. (Unfortunately, the Etsy shop from which this was saved is no longer available, so I am not sure who created it. If anyone knows, I would be ever so grateful if you would send me their name so I can update it.)

 

Is this making sense? I don’t think it’s hard to grasp the general idea of how iconic an abstract shape can be so I’m going to keep this short today. It’s also been a busy week getting all your accounts fixed up and so I should get off this computer. I challenge you to look around at the way abstract shapes are used in art work, be it your own or other people’s pieces.

 

Go Forth and Be Free… to be Inspired, For Free!

If you haven’t heard yet, starting in June (this next weekend) I will be posting the upcoming Virtual Art Box content previously planned for the VAB membership project on this blog so everyone can read it for free. I wanted readers, regardless of budget right now, to have access to these discussions, lessons, and exercises so we can all work on our art and increasing our skills and enjoyment together as well as give me the opportunity to take my work load down a notch or take breaks when necessary without being unfair to paid subscribers.

So, you can look forward to some in-depth article length discussions and ideas with a bit more juice to it than the blog usually has along with ideas on how to work with and apply the concepts if you so desire. Take it like a free class or just let the ideas sink in and enjoy the art. It’ll be here for you, starting next weekend.

Supporting Free Content

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If you have everything you want from the website at the moment, I have provided a donation option here for those who have asked and can afford to toss me a little something to help me, in particular, pay my tech guy and allow me much needed doses of dark chocolate!

So … until next weekend!

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