Monthly Archive for September, 2009

Watercolor Technique Tutorial

Published on September 30, 2009 in In Polymer and Tutorials. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Watercolor8

I am having trouble with my camera but here’s a quick and dirty tutorial on using the watercolor technique to make “torn paper” beads similar to the bead on the lower left.

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1. Mix a palette.  I always start a project by mixing a set of colors that “hang together.”  Make at least one color in each hue family and add a mud color to create a palette that you like. You don’t need much clay – 1/2 oz of each color is plenty. 

Option: Add a little bit of aluminum leaf to each of the colors. This adds a slight sparkle similar to mica in stones. I use aluminum leaf because it doesn’t tarnish.

Watercolor2

2. Mix top colors.I like to marbleize three pea sized colors from my palette to make the top colors.  I often include my mud in the mix. This mutes the starting colors so that the final watercolor sheets are more natural - not too  “easter-eggish.”  Run the  clay at the thinnest manageable setting on the pasta machine to make a very thin sheet  that is no bigger than 2″ x 3″.

Option: Do not mix the clay all the way – leave it a little bit mottled. This will add variations of color to the final sheet.  

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3. Add black and white.  Sheet white and black at the thickest setting, stack them together, and then place the top color on the white.

There are many variations of this step. The basic idea is to “wash” the very thin top color over a thick sheet of white.  This spreads the color so that it becomes lighter and brighter without actually mixing it with white clay.  The black sheet is added to the bottom for contrast when the sheet is torn.

 Option: Use an off-white such as ecru for the white layer, and a deep dark for the black layer. This option is often used by Judith Kuskin to make her beautiful jewelry

Watercolor55. Wash the top color.  Run the stacked sheets though the pasta machine starting with the thickest setting.  Go  progressively thinner until the sheet is very thin (and usually fairly long!) Mix different proportions of your palette colors to make many variations of watercolor sheets.

 Notice how much lighter and brighter the washed color is compared to the original top color.

Option: If your colors are coming out too bright,  add more mud to the top color.

Watercolor6_edited-1 6. Select a color scheme. Looking at all your watercolor sheets, use your instincts to decide which colors to put together. Audition each color with the other colors and adjust proportions until the combination looks good to you.

Before going on to the next step, lay the sheets out next to each other to see where there is lots of value contrast and where there is little. Don’t assume that all the colors will look equally as good against each other.

 

WatercolorPrep2_edited-1  7. Make mud. Because the sheets go lighter and brighter I usually use a dark color for my background. I keep my scrap clay sorted into three bins – blues and purples, greens and yellows (including oranges which are really just yellows with a little bit of red!) and reds and magentas. This makes it easier for me to mix clearer colors when I don’t want mud. When I do want mud,  I pull a little bit from each pile taking more from the blues/purples if I want a gray mud, more from the green/yellows if I want an ocher mud, and more from the reds/magentas if I want a brown mud.

WatercolorPrep8. Make base beads from mud. To make base beads, mix some mud from scraps until it is all one color.  Roll it into a ball while pressing all the air out. Roll the ball into a log and cut off chucks to make  smaller balls.

Option: If you want all your beads to be similar in size, measure and cut the same amounts off the log.

Watercolor7_edited-29. Collage torn sheets.  Tear off small pieces of the watercolor sheets and collage them onto the bead blanks. I like to leave some of the dark background color showing for contrast. Gently roll the collaged sheets into the base bead and then form the bead into a shape you like. Pierce the beads before baking if you don’t want to drill holes after baking.  Bake according to the clay brand instructions.

Option: Roll the beads with some cornstarch to make them smooth. Bake the beads on a bed of cornstarch to prevent flat spots.

Note: The beads and pendents at the top of this post are all older variations of the watercolor technique. The pivot beads from Chapter 2 are a new variation that uses a black, white and gray striped cane as the white layer.  Play with making watercolor sheets using:

  • A stretched out cane slice for the top color.
  • Crumbly old white clay for the middle layer.
  • A Skinner blend for the top color.
  • A textured white piece for the middle layer.
  • Mokume gane for the top layer.
  • A dark color for the middle layer.

The possibilities are endless!

Project #1 Pivot Bead Strands

Published on September 26, 2009 in In Fiber. 1 Comment

tricksy_gnomeThis pivot bead strand is up on tricksy_gnome’s Flickr site.  A beautiful combination of colors!

The idea for the pivot beads came when I started using canes as the underlayer for my watercolor technique.

The original watercolor beads were made for the silent auction at the second Ravensdale conference in 1998. Lindly and I were teaching a three day color workshop together and the first evening I showed her some of my early color washing experiments. At the time I was using a pre-mixed palette of Fimo colors that had foil leaf mixed in. We didn’t have any Fimo white clay so we grabbed some Sculpey II and ran very thin sheets of the Fimo over thick sheets of Sculpey. The resulting sheets looked very much like watercolor on paper so we tore them into bits to cover balls of scrap clay. 

waterbeadssm Since I needed something to donate to the silent auction, we very quickly made a collection of beads and sent them off to the auction coordinators. They were a big hit! The next night a few friends came down to our studio to help make more beads. The crew included Pier Volkous, Elise Winters, and Cynthia Toops, plus Lindly and I.  As you can imagine – the beads were gorgeous!

I am thrilled to announce that some of the original Watercolor beads from Ravensdale will be in the Racine Art Museum’s polymer clay collection. Elise Winter’s and her dedicated team of volunteers have worked endless hours to create a place for polymer clay in the museums around the country. This is an amazing step for polymer clay!

You can help make the permanent polymer clay collection at the RAM a reality by donating to the fundraising for the project. For more information go to Polymer Art Archive and read all about it.  In addition to this latest post – go back and check out some of the previous posts about putting the collection together. Fascinating!

Kudos to everyone in our community who is working so hard to place polymer in museum settings. It helps legitimize the medium for all of us – artists, crafters, hobbyists, and professionals.

crafty-goatI am working on a photo tutorial covering the basics of the original Watercolor Technique. It will also  include some tips and new ideas for making more variations of the pivot beads. In the meantime, check out a review of the book by CraftyGoat.

Exercise #3 Pivot Tiles

Published on September 19, 2009 in Tutorials. 4 Comments

829SatWhiteNeutralBlack

The concept of saturation is a tough one. The terms tinting and shading usually have to do with changing the value of a color but they also have to do with changing the saturation. Tinting is mixing a color with white, shading is mixing a color with black (or mud, or the complement.) The term “tone” is used when a color has both white and black in it. In strict color theory books – a tone is a grayed out version of the original color that still has the same value of the original color.

Instead of the standard terms “tint, shade and tone” we chose to sort colors into saturation families. Colors are either rainbow pastels, earths or earth pastels depending on how much the pure color is mixed with white, with black/mud, and with both white and mud together.

As soon as you start mixing a color with black/mud, or white, you are changing the saturation as well as the value and the hue. It doesn’t matter if you call the shifted colors muted or desaturated,  tints or rainbow pastels, tones or earth pastels,  shades or earths, the fact is that the new colors are no longer 100 % pure. 830PastelHueFamiles2

Pastel Color Sorter. All the colors on the pastel color sorter have  been desaturated with just white, or white and mud together. Notice that they have a very different feel from the colors on the Classic Color Sorter which have no white in them at all.

Saturation Zones or Families

faberbirrentinttoneshadeOur illustration for saturation families is based on Faber Birren’s “Tint, Tone and Shade” drawing. This classic diagram appears in many books on color. It shows a color modified by adding white to get tints, gray to get tones and black to get shades.

The pivot tiles you are making are designed to show all these variations of colors. The more variations you make the better you will understand the subtle differences that are available to you when you start putting colors together.

Weekend Extra Exercises

1. Any color can be pivoted. Try making pivot tiles with colors that are not pure package colors. Mix up a beautiful earth color and then make a warmer and cooler version of that color.  Tint each of the three variations with white, tone them with grey and shade them with black.

2. Make at least one tile using variations of white and black. For example, use Premo Ecru as a white,  Burnt Umber as a black, and a 1:1 mix of Ecru and Burnt Umber as the “gray”.

3.  Intentionally mix a dark mud to use instead of a black. There are many ways to make dark muds – try mixing a cool blue with a brown (Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Umber.)

4. Later on in the book, once you have mixed colors to go with your collage, make more pivot tiles to go with “your” colors.

TIPS

jeanette sclar's pivot tileUse a Sharpie to label the back of your pivot tiles with the names and proportions of the warming and cooling colors you chose and with the black and white you used.

Jeanette Sclar sent in this photo showing her variation on pivot tiles. She keeps track of the colors added and the proportions used by adding stripes to the top and side of each of the sections. In this sample she used Cobalt and Zinc Yellow Premo to pivot Cadmium Red.  The proportions on the left are:  half blue/half red and 1/4 of another square of either white, gray or black. She wrote: “ This is the perfect illustration of your statement  that cad red with any blue results in muddy purples!”

jeanettekandraykatopivots

Keep track of which black and white you are using.

Jeanette Kandray is doing a new blog just on the exercises from the book. She emailed me about the difference in the strength of the Kato clay vs the Premo blacks: “I started out working with Kato and learned that adding the black made an intense change in the color properties.  I switched to Premo and there is a big jeanettekandraypremopivotsdifference.  Now I know that I have to go very easy on the black with Kato but not so with the Premo.”

If you look at the comparison chart on page 33 , you will see the differences in the strengths of the black and white package colors for the various brands of clay.  The black and white of the Polyform clays are fairly balanced in strength  – a half and half mix (1:1)makes a middle gray. The black of Fimo Classic is a little bit stronger than the white – it takes 6 parts of white to 2 parts of black  (3:1) to make a middle value gray. The black of Fimo Soft and Kato clay is lots stronger than the white – it takes 7 parts of white to 1 part (7:1) of black to make a middle gray. That is a big difference!

FAQ’s

1. Why doesn’t your saturation diagram use the terms “tints, tones and shades?”

Our diagram was designed to show large saturation shifts – from pure to earth color for example. These large shifts put colors into groupings that have a similar feel. We think the names we chose reflect these different feelings. Tinting, toning and shading are smaller shifts that can be done to any color, regardless of the saturation family. Picture a terra cotta (an orange with both mud and white = an earth pastel ). It can be tinted, toned, and shaded the same way a pure orange can be tinted, toned and shaded to make many variations of the same color.

2. I added green to my yellow in the proportion you show (4:1) and it turned the yellow a bright green. Can I change the proportions?

Absolutely. The idea is to get slight variations – not change the color entirely. Yellows are wimps. Instead of adding 1/4 of a cool color to the yellow, you may want to add less because your green is a bully.  Just be sure to label the tiles, expecially if they vary from the directions in the book.

Jill Kollman leftovers from pivot tiles3. What to do with all the little bits leftover after making your pivot tiles?

They can be used for the Pivot Bead project or  Jill Kollmann sent me this wonderful photo and said, “ I had so much fun making my pivot tiles!  And all these wonderful swatches of clay left over.  So I made these additional “reminder” charts to reinforce the mixes in my mind.  Each of the mixed colors is in a square, and underneath each mix are dots of the 2 or 3 colors I used to make each mix.  It’s not proportional – I drew a square at the bottom so I would remember how I “got there”.  It’s raw, and covered in plastic.  So this will also help me to remember which colors shifted during baking.  Eventually I’ll “just know”, but for now this is going to help reinforce the learning.  I love color school! ”

Exercise #2 Value Sorting

Published on September 12, 2009 in In Fiber and In Polymer. 4 Comments

value scaleFive Step Value Scale

Value is defined as the amount of light reflected  by a color. If a color reflects more light than it absorbs it has a high value. If it absorbs more than it reflects, it has a low value. In the book we recommend sorting colors into just five values – colors close to white, high value/light colors, middle value/medium colors, low value/dark colors, and colors close to black.

Weekend Extra Exercises

1. Using the value scale chart on p. 33, make more than one value scale using different brands of clay.  Note that Black Fimo Soft and Kato Clay are both bullies.  It takes equal amounts of black and white to just shift the black one step to a dark value.

2.  Group the package colors into piles according to their value. How big is each pile?

3. Values are easier to see if the colors are muted. Take your value sorter and find the value of natural materials both inside and outside the house. For example – if you have a wood floor, what value is it? What about the sidewalk? The dirt?

4.  Using a color copier, make a color copy of one of your pieces, then while it is still in the copier make a black and white copy.  Identify the value of the colors in your piece by first comparing the values on the sorter to the black and white copy, then to the color copy, and then to the actual piece.

5. If you have a photo of your piece on your computer and access to Photoshop, edit the photo by going to  enhance/adjust color/remove color. Compare the two photos side by side.  Is there anything that surprises you?Mag1172dpiBW11 72dpi_edited-1 

  

  

  

  

 

 Tips

If you squint your eyes you can compare values easier than with your eyes wide open. Try looking at the color and b&w image of the watercolor bead above. Do the values match or did Photoshop “play” with the contrast?

When I first started sorting colors by value, I made 2″ x 2″ swatches, and then took them all into my bedroom closet on a piece of black paper and closed the door. They all disappeared. Then I opened the door a crack and the yellow and very light colors popped out. I put any color I could see into a pile. Then I opened the door a little more and put any color that now appeared into another pile.  I continued to open the door half inch by half inch until all the colors were sorted.  Try it!

FAQ’s

827value comps1.  Are all pure colors the same value? No, pure yellows have a high value and blue-violets have a low value. The other pure colors fall in the medium to low value range except for yellow oranges and yellow greens which are closer to  high value yellows. See the Value Comparison Chart on page 27.

The top chart shows a common – but misleading- way to show tints and shades. Why is it misleading? Because it implies that all the pure colors are equal to a middle value gray.

The bottom chart shows the relative values of  pure colors.

  

2. Do I have to make a value sorter from clay or can I use a ready made version?  Most of the ready-made versions will have more steps, which may make it easier to find the exact values, but makes it harder to sort colors into piles because there are too many choices.  Plus there is nothing like making grays to help you see value more clearly!

3.  Should I bake the 1/2″ test circles before putting them in the sorter? For the purposes of the exercise, you don’t need to bake the circles (just have fun sorting) but if you want to document the value of the package colors for future use you may want to bake them before sorting since some colors darken more than others.