In the Studio: Testing, Testing, 1-2-3
[In the Studio, April 30, 2011/Image & Artwork: designslinger_studio]
If you caught last week's post you may remember that I had an idea to try some ink color sample tests in an attempt to see what the palette I'd come up with looked like and how the colors just might work together. I came up with a system of printing each of the 14 colors with each of the 14 colors and see what kind of results I'd get. So, after cutting up a piece of linoleum into little blocks and printing out template guides on paper, I was underway.
[In the Studio, testing, testing /Image & Artwork: designslinger_studio]
I started with opaque white and decided to move from light colors to dark. Here's yellow in the works. First though I had to figure out how to keep track of all the colors and overprinting the colors to get all the combinations I was after. So I wrote the name of the color being tested under the upper left box on each sheet of paper: opaque white, lemon yellow, alizarin crimson, etc. I went back to each sheet and wrote the next color name under the next box so on. Then I inked up a block and started printing.
See the white ink in the upper left hand corner of the pic above? That was my first color. I printed it 14 times on to a single sheet of paper and moved to the next color in my line-up, lemon yellow, and printed it 14 times. You just might be able to make out my scrawled handwriting under each box, that's where I went back over every sheet and wrote down the next color in the run in an attempt to keep track of what needed to be printed where. After the first round I had to pause for a few days to let the ink dry, and next week we'll show you the final result.
See where it all began at; In the Studio: Color.
This is one of the reasons color drives me crazy. And I've only been working with colored pencils. Cerulean plus lemon yellow is not the same as lemon yellow plus cerulean. Burnish with white, or clear, or modify with marker solvent. Then do it again with cerulean and 35 other colors. I'm giving up in favor of one of those spiral-bound color manuals.
Have had two books around for a while, Colour Mixing Bible and Color Mixing for Artists, plus a recently purchased Magic Palette Color Mixing Guide. They all serve their purpose, but one person's color mix ain't necessarily another person's color combo. Then working with ink isn't quite the same as the oils you learned to work with on canvas, so everything you thought you knew, you only kinda know. We'll see if this exercise in creating a personal, loose-leaf color manual proves to be helpful at all.