My Colour Wheel!

Start of the Journey into the world of water colors

First step should always be gaining knowledge on colours. A colour wheel helps us in knowing

1. Combining which colours will give our desired shade

2. Which colours will go with which colours.

3. Which colours to avoid.

4. How to place the colours in our design

5. The relationships, the harmony between the colours etc...

"It's a fabulous thing to give life to fabric, to make something move well, the harmony of colour."

             -- Hubert de Givenchy

I have done many paintings without knowing anything about color theory and have found myself many a times scratching out my painting because it felt too sore for the eyes or too much plain... And many a times making a parody of the image that I was trying to replicate! Mostly because different types of watercolours we use the shades they provide are different. If we go for those boxes with paint cakes... They give an absolute different shade from those we get from tubes. Mostly it's because the cakes have less pigment in it as compared to those tubes... Now I wouldn't have known all this if I had not come across the color wheel and realised how much different they were. Infact, I realised I don't have a red in my cake set! It's more of an orange shade!

Well, don't wanna struggle no more. This time want to do it properly. Better late than never. Let's learn the colours!

"I love the sea's sounds and the way it reflects the sky. The colours that shimmer across its surface are unbelievable. This, combined with the colour of the water over white sand, surprises me every time."

               - John Dyer

Making of a Color Wheel

Color wheel has three concentric circles representing different values of the hue i.e., dark, medium and light.

So, start by first drawing a circle using a compass or any round objects that you can get in the house. I used cellotapes. (Had some different sizes of those used for packing and all lying around!) We need to make three concentric circles. Divide the thus formed circle into 12 sections which will correspond to 12 shades of colors including all the primary, secondary and tertiary colors. 

First, we will start with primary colors in the sections as shown below. I have labelled in front of each section names corresponding to the colors that will go into it.

Outer circle will be the pure color in its strongest shade or value. Middle circle will be a lighter version. In watercolor, instead of adding white to make a color light we can simply add more water. Like dip the brush with the hue in a clean water just a bit and wipe of the excess water and we get a lighter value. Adding more water in the similar manner will give us even lighter version which goes in the inner circle. 

After the primary colours we will go step by step. 

For example, if we start with yellow, to the right of yellow is red in the above figure. So, the secondary and tertiary colors in between them will be obtained by mixing yellow and red in various proportions. Second from right of yellow will be the secondary colour orange obtained by mixing yellow and red in equal proportions. Mixing yellow to orange will give us the tertiary colour yellow orange (the name implies yellow pigment is present more in proportion to red). Similarly, adding more red to the orange would give us red orange implying red is present in greater proportion. That's kind of literal!

Another way, (the way I did) the artistic/realistic approach is, take a little amount of yellow and red separately. Below is an image of my butterfly pallete (pardon the mess please!). In the centre mixing well, I have taken a small amount of yellow and red, as shown below.

Slowly using a wet brush bring a little yellow into the red to get yellow orange with yellow pigment prominent.

And in similar fashion bring in more yellow into the red to get orange and further mixing will result in red orange. Done!!!!!

Now, that's the first quadrant. For the rest... Follow the same approach with respective colors.

And there, we have the famous our own color wheel... My own!! 

"Blue is the male principle, stern and spiritual. Yellow the female principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy and always the colour which must be fought and vanquished by the other two."

                - Franz Marc

Experiment with different shades and values, and we shall get amazing results!

Here, I have used red, canary yellow and cobalt blue from the poster colors I have. 

Please note that different types of red, yellow and blue will give different shades. Like in my color wheel, the purple that I got doesn't look so much like a purple.

So having a colour mapping diagram would be very much useful for reference because there are so many shades around us and to capture them... To map those colours and better understand them a reference is required. And our color wheels and other such reference would be an advantage. Would save up so much time we might otherwise spent raking our brains trying to decode the exact colour. 

Again, I have a 24 shades camlin watercolor cakes for students.

I tried to build up a miniature color sheet (not a wheel) using the colors available in this. 

That red was not much of a red... It was almost orange. Most of the shades were fine but I still couldn't get a decent purple! Second shade in the third row on the left is a sort of Maroon or dark pink. 

Using that for Red, I got the following results:

Mmm... Much better. Keep doing this and try to fill a full sheet with mix-matches and values (dark, medium, light). A good excercise but trust me a very much required excercise.

Ok I think it's enough for today. I had been working on paints and writing this blog together for almost this whole evening and still don't feel like stopping but... 

I guess, I should wind up for now.

C u later, my blog!

Was trying out something I had seen... More on this later. 

"Art is nothing but the expression of our dream; the more we surrender to it the closer we get to the inner truth of things, our dream-life, the true life that scorns questions and does not see them."

                    - Franz Marc

🙏

27.05.2021