Tests
These are works where I'm not being expressive, but rather testing out materials or techniques. For some reason, I've started doing a lot of basic color testing and exploration, rather than my usual habit of just winging it when it comes to color. Maybe I'm getting less adventurous in my old age.
23 February 2008
Hue/Value chart: Acrylic on Paper
I made a chart of the value (darkness) of all of my tube paints, organizing it so that the color goes through the spectrum from left to right, and higher spots denote higher values. I used the Munsell value ratings that are printed on the tubes; some paints are more transparent so their spots turn out lighter than they should. (If I were to paint several layers, the spots would be appropriately dark.)
There are some interesting things I found out by doing this. For instance, I have a green (Pthalocyanine) and a purple (Dioxanine) that are as dark as my darkest black (Ivory).
I didn't include my iridescent colors on the chart, because they don't have a printed value rating; the amount of light they reflect depends on the viewing angle.
12 February 2008
Greyscale: Acrylic on Paper
Here I just mixed up some greys and knifed them onto a piece of paper. I've never had a greyscale around but I figured it might be useful for something.
6 February 2008
Little Landscape 412/320: Acrylic on Paper
Another small test landscape, this time with Prussian Blue Hue and Medium Yellow Azo.
2 February 2008
412/320 Grid: Acrylic on Paper
Here I've done the mixing grid thing with a diffferent pair of yellow and blue. The blue is Prussian Blue Hue (320) and the yellow is Medium Yellow Azo (412).
I've decided that I like the look of the grid more when the tape is on than after it is removed, so I think that if/when I do this in the future, I'm just going to dispense with the tape and draw lines on the paper for the grid instead. As bonuses, I won't be removing part of the paper surface with the tape, and it'll be less work for me to do.
And speaking of less work, I'm not even going to bother fixing up the photo I took of this test with the tape removed.
31 January 2008
159/470 Grid: Acrylic on Paper
I wasn't terribly satisfied with the previous test, and decided to build a grid of mixed colors from the same paints, Cerulean Blue Hue (470), Cadmium Yellow Light Hue (159), and white. The first column goes from the pure yellow on the top to the pure blue on the bottom. Increasingly more white is mixed in as you move rightward. This grid is good for seeing what individual different colors one can get, while the landscape was good for seeing, how all of these blues, greens, and yellows appear when set next to one another.
I think both types of test are informative and probably worth doing.
Below is the same test, with the tape removed. I use a palette knife to paint the swatches; that's what's leaving the impasto lines in them.
I wish I had thinner tape, so as not to get such big white gutters.
28 January 2008
Little landscape 470/159: Acrylic on Paper
Here, I started with one blue-yellow pair whose green I particularly liked in my last test (below): these were Cerulean Blue Hue (fifth column; manufacturer's color number 470) and Cadmium Yellow Light Hue (second row, color 159). To this pair I added white, and with those three paints, I painted a little test image. The idea was to try to see the entire range of greens that can be mixed with these colors.
24 January 2008
Trouble with my blues: Acrylic on Paper
It just so happens that I am a very, very poor blues guitarist. But that's not what this is about.
It also happens that I have been frustrated at trying to mix greens at many points in my life. Green is typically made by mixing yellow with blue, so I laid out all of my yellows and blues and mixed up a green from each pair. Since the last time I was using acrylics, the Liquitex line has lost some colors and gained some, so some of my blues and yellows were unfamiliar to me. Although I wasn't able to capture the color exactly on the photo below, the main features of the results are still visible.
There are a couple of things that struck me about these mixes. First, the greens mixed with Yellow Oxide (the bottom row) turned out very red, indicating Yellow Oxide itself has a lot of red. Even the next-to-last row (mixed with Naples Yellow Hue) is fairly red/muddy.
The thing that stood out the most for me, though, was the fifth column, which was mixed with Cerulean Blue Hue. In that column, the greens can almost all be described as emerald, which is the green I've had the most trouble getting. In all of the other columns, the greens are more spruce or pine or leaf. So it turns out that I have six blues that mix forest-type greens, and only one that leans the other way. No wonder I've been having trouble getting the greens I want!
On top of that, Cerulean Blue Hue is one of the colors I just added to my box. This means that before, all of my blues were of the other type...I had none that would mix a clean emerald.
So at some point soon, I'm going to acquire some other blues to see if I can find others that mix good emerald-type greens.
Another interesting thing here is comparing the fifth and the sixth columns. The fifth is Cerulean Blue Hue, and the sixth is the real deal: Cerulean Blue. (Cerulean Blue, made with chromium, is an expensive color, so the manufacturer provides an alternative supposedly equivalent color.) Anyhow, these two colors have the same Munsell hue, which means that they lie on the same place on the color wheel. But the two paints don't create the same colors when used in mixtures! So I guess the color wheel is a good approximation tool for color mixing, and a decent learning tool, but it doesn't tell the full story.
This means, for instance, that when I go to buy new blues to see if I can get ones that mix good emeralds, I can use their Munsell hue as a rough estimate (I want a blue that leans towards green, not towards purple) but in the end, I'll have to test whatever colors I get before I'll know if it'll deliver.