Thursday 19 December 2013

Painting your own colour wheel

In order to get to know my paints and colours again/better, I'm spending some time with mixing colours. A very useful tool for colour mixing is a colour wheel. You can buy ready made ones, very elaborate with loads of informations and in different sizes. But while they are no doubt useful, making a simple colour wheel yourself has the great advantage that it is made with your own paints and colours.

It takes a bit of time, especially if you're as useless at geometry as I am. But eventually, I figured out how to find the centre and measure (more or less) equal portions on a circle. Drawing the whole thing up on a piece of paper the size of your wheel, before copying the whole thing on your actual canvas, makes it a lot easier.


When you have copied all the sections onto your canvas, you can start filling in the colours. Start with the primary colours (blue, red and yellow), then add the secondary colours (orange, green and purple), which are opposite the primary colours. The primary colours are the colours that can't be mixed from any other colours. The secondary colours are basically the respective mixes of two primary colours.


Then add the tertiary colours in between by mixing the two colours next to it (green + yellow, yellow + orange, orange + red, red + purple, purple + blue, blue + green). Et voilà, your own basic colour wheel is finished.


I like to see how my paints look like when adding white, which makes them more pastelly. So I added another section below each of the colours/mixes.


To finish it off, I went over all the white areas with white paint, to tidy it up, and then added a layer of varnish. 

Another advantage of making your own colour wheel, apart from helping you see the relations between the different colours of your own paints, is that it also shows you the opacity/transparency of the colours. It takes some time to make, but it's worth it.

1 comment:

  1. Great idea Kay! Thank you for the lovely card I received today! It made me smile :0)
    Have a wonderful Christmas :0)
    xx

    ReplyDelete