Color Study

Materials Needed:

*Tempura paint

*Various paint brushes

*Large sheets of card stock paper

*Water

*Water cups

*Paper towels

This project is for the study of color and its interaction with complimentary colors and accent colors.

I began this assignment by picking a shape that I liked, which was a simple rectangular shape. I then picked two complimentary colors – blue and orange. I began by creating a rectangle using my paintbrush and only the color orange on my paper. Once I had put a couple of randomly placed and sized rectangles on my paper, I added just a tiny amount of the compliment, blue to my orange and painted on more rectangles (this time thinking about my placement as far as composition and balance goes). After a couple of rectangles, I added more blue to my orange and added yet again a couple more rectangles, making more conscious decisions about where I want to place them each time to create a good and balanced composition. I continue this process until my color is almost completely blue. I started overlapping shapes to create depth and show contrast in the adjacent colors.

After I finish with the adding of the complimentary color process, I go back to pure orange again and begin adding white, proceeding with the same process as I did with adding blue. Once I have gone until it is nearly completely white, I start over again and begin adding black. I repeat the process. After the black is finished, then I will start over again with grey and again repeat the process. While I am going through these processes, I am constantly deciding where I want to put my rectangles. They are going in different directions, different sizes, etc. I decided to have some going off the page.

After I mixed all of the colors and went through all of the color experimenting processes with the color orange, it was time to add an accent color. Since my paper was yellow and my colors were mainly orange, with hints of blue, I felt that red was a good option. I wanted to keep the palette on the warm side. Keeping the accent color to only taking up 10% of the paper, I placed it right in the middle of the page behind all of my other rectangles, adding a point of emphasis and interest, pulling you into the piece.

Through this project, I learned how to go about color study in a more fun and interesting way as opposed to the traditional color wheels and color/value strips. This was a fun and interesting way to see how colors interact with other colors as well as learning the value of color mixing. I think this is definitely one of the more fun ways of learning some color theory.