Here are pictures of some more of my latest forays into Polymer Clay Color Explorations.
The advantage of making color scale triangles is that you get to see a bigger sampling of the colors you can mix with your primaries — the eggplants and the browns, for example. I know I don’t usually mix these colors except by accident. After I finished a couple of triangles, I was struck by how appealing some of these colors can be and how in the color mixing I had been doing, I had been limiting myself to “safe” predictable colors (like white and a touch a green makes mint). The color scale triangles let me see the nuances that emerged with each color combination.
This exercise is more than academic. Since it requires you to document your color mixtures, you come away with a concrete idea of how you got every color in the triangle. The practical application is that when you want to mix a particular color- say something you saw in a magazine, and the exact color is not in your triangle, you have a good idea of what colors you need to start with, and what to add to the mixture, to get the shade you want. Amazing!
These two triangles are similar, but the one on the left uses slightly different blue and magenta primaries than the one on the right.
This is a “color wheel” that I mixed with my primaries going from my yellow to my blue, my blue to my magenta, and my magenta to my yellow. The colors in the middle of all of the scales are made of 1/2 of the base color and 1/2 white.
My primaries are: Yellow-1/2 zinc and 1/2 cadmium with a pea of white, Magenta-3/4 fuchsia and 1/4 medium red with a pinch of white and Blue: 7/8 ultramarine and 1/8 cobalt with a pinch of white.
Watch Maggie Maggio’s excellent video on mixing color scale triangles for a thorough explanation of the exercise.