Color Mixing Exercise

A couple of weeks ago in my beginning oil painting classes at SLC we learned more about mixing color. Most everybody struggles in the beginning to get their mixing skills to a point where they can easily mix a value and color for the painting they are working on. This usually comes with just lot's and lot's of painting, but you can do a few color mixing exercises to help you learn.
This exercise is one of the many simple tools out there to get you started. In some art schools you do this kind of exercise using many colors, for weeks and weeks, before you even begin to paint. We used the everyday paint tube colors that are out on our palette, starting with the warm and moving around to the neutrals. You can do it any way you like. Just begin at the top with white, then, using your first color (yellow) paint the block along the top in the same order and along the left side. The idea is to meet the color in the middle, then add white. Continue with the next color, only this time and on all of the following colors, you will be mixing the color next in line, going across and down first. Then again mix the colors down the left side with the ones along the top, only this time you add white to the mix. You will find that the lower colors at the diagonal line from the starting point and below will be your tints and above that pure color mixes.
After a while you will really start to enjoy the process and look forward to what the next tube color will do when mixed with the next.
You will find yourself getting to the value and color you are looking for faster the next time you paint. Try it! **If you paint your graph on a piece of loose canvas you can roll it up after it dries and easily carry it with you to class.

Color Mixing &Value Workshop This Week

These past couple of weeks we have been learning about color and value in the beginning oil painting classes at the School of Light and Color.

I was surprised and delighted that these students were more than willing to use their class time to make charts. I have a wonderful group of students both on Tuesday evening and on Wednesday mornings at the school. These students want to do the work in order to learn. I know it's tough to come into a class as a beginner, especially when we feel that everybody else knows more than we do. But if you can take that risk  and show up, you find out that we are all students, and eventually we figure out that it is a lifetime journey and not a quick study. I love it when one of the gals or guys fall in love with the process, and after getting through the initial stunning fact that it isn't as easy as they thought, become willing to take on the challenge. It is so exciting to see that look on their faces as they light up with an "Aha" moment. 

Anyway, back to the exercises. We drew some one inch squares and put the complements on either side. It is surprising what you can learn by doing simple exercises like mixing complementary colors to make beautiful grays. We mixed the a little of one complement into the other, then a little more, then half and half. It was also interesting to begin to mix white into these mixes where the beautiful grays began to emerge.

We talked about the importance of using grays in your painting, and that it is also important to use value to state a predominant - middle and little value design in your paintings.

Then we made value charts using color, first using black and white to light and darken, and the other using analogous (colors next to our main color on the color wheel) colors to keep as much chroma (rich color) in our mixes as possible.

We talked how to use value changes to turn a form and how value and color are dependent on what you are comparing it to. We squinted to see our values.

After that we made a value scale in black and white, then found paint colors from the tube and matched the value on the scale. After using tube color, we used mixes and found the value using the same scale.

I believe these exercises are invaluable....because we actually learn from DOING. It's all fine to read about this stuff in the art books and magazines, but we will miss the connection if you don't actually do the work. Also, we will learn more from making mistakes than if we don't make mistakes. So we were freed up to make them!

My hope is that when these students are painting their next painting they will reach for a color/value on the palette, and not just think in color alone. They will begin to see value and color all around them. It is not easy but I'm hoping that they will begin to group smaller shapes into larger value shapes, and then begin to design a painting using these concepts. It will take time, and we can only learn so much at a time, so sometime in the next 6 months we probably do this all over again.