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.

Blank Canvas

I've been painting (more or less intensely) for many, many years, and for quite a few of those, I went to classes run by a local artist. I've learnt a lot from him over the years, but there is a time when one has to move on from one's teacher in order to develop further, and in my case, this moment has been long overdue. Don't get me wrong, I am very grateful for everything I learnt from my teacher. But he has his own style of painting, and his own view of how to mix colours, and of which materials and brands to use, of how things should be done, or not. And his way of doing things might not necessarily my way. At least not anymore. In the past three years or so, I've discovered a whole new world, thanks to the wonderful world of blogging and online classes. I discovered new techniques, new paints, new ways of mixing colours, new subjects, new styles, new inspiration.

So now, as we near the end of another year, I have decided that now is the time to break away from the "old" ways, and that the best way to do that is to start again, from scratch. To re-discover painting, from the very beginning. How to mix colours, how to paint different techniques, different subjects, with different mediums. I'm also in the process of re-arranging my little studio, to make more room and space for creating, so this seems to fit just perfectly too. A fresh start all around.

This whole process of re-discovering painting for myself might take a while, and I don't know how much I'll be blogging about it. I might just have to take some time off, for myself, to play, to experiment, to find my own way. I really don't know. All I know is that in order to grow and develop,  I have to start again from the beginning. Apart from re-discover my preferred medium of the past 15+ years, acrylics, I also want to finally try and discover the world of oil painting, something I've  been wanting to do for ages, but never really quite dared. It all just sounds so complicated and dangerous, what with underpaintings, long drying times, self-igniting substances and fumes...

So in the next few weeks, you might see less about painting etc., and maybe instead more photographs (another of my passions), inspirations, and a bit more about my latest passion - you might have guessed already - pottery. I really don't quite know myself how this will all go, but one thing I can say for sure; I'm really very excited about it!