Sara Mathewson

I did the color chart below sometime last week. I have been having a difficult time writing about it though. I decided a little over a week ago that I should maybe take a look at some of my old watercolor “how to” books and work on refining some of my rusty skills. Taking a year off does make one rusty! So, in lesson one of this book by Anne Elsworth titled”Watercolor Workbook, A complete course in ten lessons”, she shows us a color chart with the basic colors for a beginning watercolor student. I have never done a color chart before and decided that it could be a worthwhile lesson for me. The funny thing is that I didn’t use my regular palette. I used a palette that I had filled a few years back with most of the same colors that she talks about. I did make a couple of mistakes as I was supposed to have sap green on the bottom of the left hand column and thought I had it, but when I looked carefully at the pigment I realized it was more of a true green and is probably “permanent green”. The other one is across the top, I have what I think is cadmium red, but it is also more of a “true” red than a “warm” red. Oh well. Other than that I think the chart came out pretty well. Each block is divided into six parts. The three on the left are the “full strength” pigments and the three on the right are the tints. The top one on the left has the color from the top of the chart full strength with a small amount of the color at the left of the chart. Then the top right one has the tint from that one. The bottom left box has more of the pigment from the left handed color and less from the top color, and the right hand bottom box has the tint to go with that. The middle one is equal amounts of both colors and the middle right has the tint of that. This is what I have been struggling with trying to convey. I hope it is understandable. I have to say that it was a valuable experience and I will use this chart for future reference. I will probably make some more charts with other pigments I have, like the pigmanets on my John Pike Pallette. But, it is a time consuming procedure, it took me more than two days to complete it. And I like to actually paint some pictures, so they will be seen sometime in the future. My thoughts about this lesson and this book in general was that I was going to go through all the lessons and move on. Well, I got through lesson two and will be doing three at some point, but I’m not sure I will do the whole book again. Maybe I will just do the lessons that I feel I need to really work on and forego the rest. Of course I do think it is worthwhile to hone ones skills. But, as I only have so much energy to use in any given day, I have to choose what I do with it wisely. The good news is that I have had more energy in the past couple of weeks than I have had in many, many months. I will write a post about this later.

The thing about making your own color chart is that you can see firsthand how the pigments work together both when mixing and on the paper. I tried to do the mixing right on the paper, but it didn’t work out as well, so I decided to do it on the palette first and then transfer the mixed color to the box. In the future, I might use a bigger sheet of paper to do a color chart. It was a bit difficult to use such tiny boxes. The paper I used is 8&1/2 x11. It worked because I used a limited palette in the first place. But like I said, I will do it larger next time to make it easier to do. The other thing is that the mixes were approximate and not absolute. Of course this is how it is done if you are mixing your own colors. I doubt many artists sit and use a mathematical equation to get the amount of each pigment in a mixture precise. Although I can’t say this for a fact. I just have a feeling this is the way it is<G>.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 8:42 am and is filed under Painting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.