The first round of color scales I made used two primary colors, for example Red to Yellow. It didn’t take long before I started making value scales – taking a color to a white and then taking a color to a black. After awhile, I started making color scales using complementary colors to find the earth colors and neutrals in […]
Smashing Color
with Maggie Maggio
Taking some time to make and document color mixes is the best way to learn how to mix colors instinctively. Playing scales on the piano trains the ear, making color mixes trains the eye. Color scales are my favorite way to record my color mixes but I encourage you to come up with your own system for keeping track […]
The idea for the Color Scales came when I was struggling to keep track of all the test mixing I was doing when I first started using polymer clay in the mid ’90’s. I decided there had to be a better way to organize all the little bits of clay and tried all kinds of systems before […]
The Polymer Penguin’s pivot beads take the idea in a whole new direction. Zjet’s Flickr site has some gorgeous collages and shows more of her many colored pivot beads. The color coordinated caps add a beautiful finishing touch. Dora Arsenault strung multi-colored pivot beads into an eye-catching necklace. Dottie McMillan, author of Artful Ways with Polymer Clay, […]
There are many ways to play with this project. Jeanette Kandray sent a photo of her necklace on the collage that inspired it. Its not a rainbow skinner blend. Instead it is more of a value study from the dark purples though the pinks with the yellows of the collage captured in the yellow used for the […]
I’ve seen some wonderful images posted online by artists who have already made the Pinched Petal Necklace project in Chapter 4. Here’s a gorgeous one from Nora Pero’s flickr site. I especially love the tomato red centers! I would like to post a sampling of Pinched Petal necklace photos on Saturday for the Weekend Extra. If you have […]
When you are instinctive mixing it helps to imagine the direction that you want to move the color. Once you know the direction, you can find the path. 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 […]
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