To that end, I invented an exercise for myself. I reproduced the same simple design using 6 mediums -- acrylic paints, watercolor, colored pencil, water-soluble crayons, felt-tip pens, and paper. I aimed for the same color combinations, but as you'll see, they turned out very different.
Acrylic -- colors mixed on the palette
Acrylic -- colors layered on the canvas
Colored pencil
Water-soluble crayon
Felt-tip pen
Watercolor
Paper mosaic
What did I learn?
- I need much more practice mixing colors (that lifeless acrylic magenta is so sad).
- I enjoyed the variety of movement -- big swooping brush strokes (acrylic and watercolor), karate chops (pencil and pen), and nervous bursts of ripping (paper mosaic).
- Each medium has its own attitude -- the felt-tip pen seems comic and the mosaic a bit self-righteous, for example.
- Each medium requires a different effort. The watercolor took minutes, the paper mosaic hours.
If you dabble in multiple mediums, give this exercise a try. Let me know what you discover!
Color is always a challenge and then everything I learned in a color class in college was thrown out the window when I got to weaving and dyeing - the interlacing of the warp & weft affect color and mixing dyes for fiber is so different than paint. The learning is never ending.
ReplyDeleteHere's a color challenge for you out of that class - take a photograph and then paint a copy of it (we used acrylics) trying to use colors in all the same value so when a black & white picture is taken at the end it looks all the same color. I don't think anyone in the class reached perfection but it was a good exercise.
Wow, I thought the color wheel was an absolute thing! How interesting.
ReplyDeleteI may try that exercise, once I get a bit more experience with acrylics under my belt.