Painting Pages

The collage workshop started on Wednesday and the first assignment was - no surprise - to paint collage papers as opaque, streak free, and clean as possible. Mine are what they are. I've studied colour all my life to the point that I mentally check out the minute someone mentions the colour wheel or colour theory. Luckily, we were told to explore colour with no rules, no recipes and no note taking. YES YES - I can do that. 

I'm using copy paper and painting three stripes on each page. There are fifty-eight in the stack above for a total of 174 different colours. I painted for an hour on Wednesday and then another hour yesterday and I'll do another hour each today, Monday, and Tuesday before posting my images to the class. I'll have a lot of colours to play with when we start the collages. 
 

All of my stripes are made by putting some black, some white, and some of another colour on the palette and then working my way up and down the value scales starting with white plus a little of the colour and adding more colour until a mid value and then adding black. Once I've gotten to a very dark value with that range, I add a new colour and then keep adding more and more white working my way back to a light value. I've been concentrating on getting sufficient light values as that's always been a difficult range for me to work in. It needs practice. 

 

These greens were developed from a pure green added to the purple grey mix that you can see on the edges of the plate with more and more white added until I ran out of white on the palette.

After that, I added orange and then kept adding more orange to get the range of colours show above from purple-grey to brown. I'm sure that colour theory popped into my head subconsciously but as much as I was able to I was simply playing, adding this and adding that, and seeing what happened. I'm quite pleased with my stack of painted pages and even more pleased with how much fun it was to make them - a good beginning to the workshop. 

Talk soon - Myrna

Grateful - happy mixing