Colour 1

Class started with a slide lecture, including a demonstration of how additive colour works - three overhead projectors with sheets of coloured acetate - orange + violet + green = white. And I didn't think to take photos....

A quote from Van Gogh, about complementary colours: they are like lovers, continually fighting, but they excite each other to maximum vividness when they are next to each other.

The three dimensions of colour are hue (its ancestry: blue, red, etc); tone (more of which later); chroma (intensity). As I understand chroma, a colour becomes less and less intense if you add more and more of the complementary colour to it. Here's one I prepared earlier - it's really about colour mixing, but in the vermilion-cerulean line near the bottom you can see how the combination reaches the achromatic state (grey) -

Colour "happens" in paintings when there is contrast - but there are various kinds of contrast - light v. dark (tone); hue; complementary (which may also be known as successive contrast - I'm not clear on this); simultaneous, where closely-related colours give a "glow", or when an intense colour is next to grey, the grey picks up the opposite colour; proportion; and temperature (warm and cool).

It was fun to stare and stare at blocks of colour, then look at a white surface and see the after-image in the opposite colour. Try it yourself here at the bottom of the page.

Johannes Itten and Joseph Albers are the uhr-gurus of colour. Look and read, read and look...

Then the tonal exercises. Make a tonal scale with various hues (these are from a paint-chip card). Homework is to match those tones by mixing up various shades of grey.

Then, finding different hues of the same tonal value, light medium dark. The photo in monochrome mode shows I didn't do so well with the medium values - indeed with any of them; might have to try a different brand of paint chips -

After class I went to the Gerhard Richter Portraits exhibition, and stopped in at the art store for some black and white paint, but ended up bringing home some of the rest of the spectrum as well ...