I would like to post a sampling of Pinched Petal necklace photos on Saturday for the Weekend Extra. If you have photos you would like to share, email them to me at maggiomc@aol.com. If you can also send a photo or scan of your necklace with your collage that’s even better!

The ”path” is the imaginary line that runs between the color you have and the color that you want.  If you extend this line across the color sorter, any color along that line can be used to move the color to where you want it to be.   This is especially true when you are mixing the desaturated colors that fall on the inside of the color sorter.  Here’s the example from the book diagrammed on the color sorter.

Color 1 shows  the first step -  mixing green from yellow and blue.  Color 2 shows  moving the color toward blue by mixing it with a little more blue. Since the color that you want has more mud in it, you need to move it toward the center of the color sorter. Color 3 shows the color moved toward the center by mixing it with “mud”, in this case a brown mud.   

Imagine the other choices that fall along the same path for moving Color 2 toward the center. You could mix Color 2 with gray, with brown, with brick red, or with cherry red (the complement of emerald green) and it would move into the same place. The only difference would be in the proportion of Color 2 used in each mixture.   

Weekend Extra Exercises

1.  Make a small amount of emerald green and divide it into two pieces.  Mix one piece with with a brown mud to make a spruce color. Mix the second piece with a cherry red to make a similar spruce color.  How much mud did it take to move the emerald to spruce?  How much cherry red?

2.  There can be many paths to get to the same color.  Mix three versions of olive green by following three different paths:

          1. Lemon Yellow to Blue Violet

          2 Emerald Green to Yellow Orange

          3. Lime Green to Ochre

3. Try mixing some of the other earth colors by following different paths.

4. Cut your instinctive mixes of earth colors in half. Add white to one half.  Compare the pastel versions to the original  earth color. Can you see the mud?

TIPS

• Use small amounts of clay to practice instinctive mixing.  Once you get the hang of moving colors along pathways you can start using larger amounts of clay with greater confidence.
• If you are not sure of proportions, start with a half and half mix and then adjust as you go.
• You don’t need to keep track of proportions in instinctive mixing but if you want to remember what you did in each step you can make small reference piles like the ones shown in the book.

This is the first of two Studio Tool exercises in the book.  We originally had more of them, including a fan deck of Skinner blends, but due to space limitations we had to cut them out. I will try to add instructions for the missing tools at the point in the book where we wanted them to be.

The Tasting Tiles are designed to be part of a reference set of color samples that you keep on hand to check when you are deciding which clays to use to make a palette.

A few years ago I posted instructions and a form for test mixing secondaries that was based on mixing all the secondaries using equal parts of the primaries. (Download PDF Test Mixing Handout (for Premo and Kato) or (for Fimo)

For the book, Lindly and I decided to use different formulas for each the secondary colors:

Violets: 1/2 blue:1/2 magenta

Greens: 3/4  yellow: 1/4 blue

Oranges: 15/16 yellow: 1/16 magenta

Muds: 1/3 yellow, 1/3 blue. 1/3 magenta

NOTE: The diagram of GREEN on the bottom page 56 is incorrect. It should show 1 part blue:3 parts yellow. (I am much more understanding of mistakes in books now that we have published ours!)

Tasting Tiles are all about undertanding hue bias, and hue bias is all about MUD. Here’s an excerpt from the same post from a few years ago about test mixing and mud:

Traditional theory says R+Y+B =Black, and Modern Theory says C+M+Y=Black.  Reality is Three Primaries = MUD. I define MUD as the color you get when you mix primaries in equal amounts. Depending on which primaries you pick MUD can be many colors.

Traditional MUD 

If you have been mixing colors using the traditional Red, Yellow, Blue primaries then you are familiar with the reality that MUD is in the middle. MUD in the RYB system is usually closer to a brown than a gray.

Modern MUD

This diagram of the CMY color space shows that the mixture of C+M+Y is somewhere between black and white. MUD in the CMY system is more gray than brown.  Note that this diagram is misleading because it shows the primaries all at a middle value and we know that’s not true!

 Understanding Primaries Undertone/Bias

There are no perfect primaries. Each of the colors we think of as a primary leans a little (or a lot) toward one of the other primaries. This is called the color’s bias. See page 25.

When you try to mix a secondary color from two primaries you need to know how far away your primaries are from the imaginary perfect primaries. For example, Ultramarine Blue is really Cyan, or primary blue, with quite a bit of Magenta. Golden Yellow is Yellow with just a titch of Magenta.

If you mix Ultramarine Blue with Golden Yellow expecting a bright green you will be disappointed. The magenta in Ultramarine and the magenta in Cad Yellow will get together and steal an equal amount of primary blue from the Ultramarine and also grab some yellow from the Cad Yellow.

The combined B+M+Y will make a MUD that is close to gray. That gray will mix with the green to make a gray green instead of a bright green.

To successfully mix colors, the first thing you need to know is how much Blue, Magenta and Yellow are in each of the colors. One way to find this out is by mixing tasting tiles.

Time to start mixing colors! Be sure to label as you go . . .”

Weekend Extras Exercises

1. Make the tasting tiles in clays other than Premo.

2. Try using orange reds, such as Premo Cadmium Red, Fimo Soft Indian Red, or Sculpey Tomato Red instead of magenta/fuchsia/cherry red versions of the primaries.

3. Change the formulas for the secondaries based on the results you get using our consensual formulas.

4. Make a set of tasting tiles using mixed primary colors instead of primaries out of the package.

5. Customize/mix your primary colors so that you get the secondaries you like the best.

6. If you haven’t watched Beau Lotto’s  TED video that Cynthia posted on Polymer Clay Daily yesterday – watch it! Its very fun and shows lots of what will be covered when we get to the chapter on “Playing Games with Color.”

TIPS

You can choose any primary from the chart on p. 138  to mix tasting tiles.

Make a chart similar to the one shown at the top of the post and label each square with the clays and formulas you are using to make the tasting tiles. Bake the samples on the chart so that you can keep track of what you are doing. 

If you don’t want to make the pie chart labels you can label the tasting tiles using a Sharpie.

When tinting the center of the tasting tiles with white, try to keep the mix close to 1/2 color/1/2 white.

FAQs

1.  Why are some reds in the primary section of the chart on p.138 and some reds in the secondary section? 

There is so much yellow in Orange Reds that they cannot be used to mix clear violets. If you don’t mind muddy violets feel free to use orange reds as primaries.

2. Tasting tiles are a lot of work – why bother? 

In the process of making them you will learn a huge amount about how colors mix, plus you will have the tiles on hand for future reference. Just do it!

 Which colors have the most MUD? Which the least? Can you figure out why?

At first they went up willy-nilly, but when I stepped back I realized I had to take them all down and sort them into groups according to color.

This is the first collage of the five that I sorted that day and I’ve been making color collages ever since.  Lindly and I have made hundreds of collages over the years. Have fun making yours!

Weekend Extra Exercises

Make lots of collages!

TIPS

The more clippings you have the easier it will be to see ” color themes” in the clippings that you like.

Remember that you are not designing a color scheme – you are documenting one.

Work quickly and intentionally.

If you are struggling to see a “theme” – pick one of the clippings you like the most, and then auditition the rest of the clippings. Do they feel the same? Do they have the same colors?  Do they “hang with” that clipping.

Don’t settle for ”it almost goes.” Find more magazines and look for clippings that really do have similar colors and are similar in feeling.

Try to divorce your preferences for texture and imagery from your preferences for colors. Its hard to do – you may have to resort to the old trick of turning the clippings upside down.

FAQ’s

1.  Do I have to cover the whole board? Yes – the background will shift the colors so cover it all up.

2. Can I use just part of a clipping? Sure, feel free to cut away anything that is not working for your collage.

3. Does it matter what size the clippings are? No – you can use a full page from a magazine if that is what you are responding to – or you can use just a corner of a small photo if that works well with your collage.

Here’s the first (and maybe the last!) video made in my studio. You can just make out the first set of five collages in the background.  It was done in one take and its a little bit dark. I was hoping to edit it and brighten it up a bit but I’m afraid the video editing software is currently way beyond my skills! With any luck I will be able to get my nephew, Joey, to come down to Portland from Seattle sometime soon and give me a tutorial.  There are few parts that make me cringe (who picked that music??) but I want to share it with you anyway. One warning – color collaging can be addictive!