Colour 3

Mixing - oil paints. We were told to wear old clothes and bring lots of rags, or two rolls of kitchen towels. Yes, we did need them.

A demo of getting 11 colours by starting with two complementaries. First you mix the middle one, then the shades either side of it - remembering to wipe the palette knife betweentimes, so as not to contaminate the paint! Test the middle colour and the ones either side by adding a bit of white (not too much) to check that you've made a grey that goes slightly blue one side and orange the other...

I used chrome green and alizarin crimson, and my "grey" was more of a brown - with this much white, it looked like it needed a bit more green, but a darker tone showed it was actually ok. Mixing up enough of each colour was a bit of a problem - we needed quite a bit of paint later when we mixed lighter and darker shades, adding white or black.

Some of my tones consist of very little paint indeed, and are not terribly accurate. Also, there was some time pressure near the end (excuses, excuses...)

Final step was to transfer it to paper, preferably having some thick paint (without the white paper showing through).

And finally, cleaning the palette. The best part of the day!

In Colour 4 we'll be doing "observational colour" (wonder what that is...) and there's other kinds of colour, expressionistic for example. Lots to learn.