Value and Subtractive Color Exploration

Color wheels and value scales are always good exercises. Knowing how to mix colors certainly isn't one of my strong points. I originally didn't read the assignment very carefully, and thought that I already had the correct paint colors--blue, red, and yellow. I had to run to the art store to grab cyan and magenta after I realized my mistake. I never remember that cyan and magenta are the "true" primary colors you use in order to mix all the other colors. Seeing the results, though, you can tell that they made much better secondary colors--especially the green. Both my scanner and my camera didn't do a great job of capturing the value scale--the last few boxes all look fairly white. When I tried to go darker it made the middle values look the same, so I went back to how it was.

Typically, I enjoy drawing over painting. In this controlled exercise, however, painting was more fun. As I had to buy new paint and paintbrushes anyway, I may try to paint more often. I always kind of groan at the idea of mixing colors, but maybe now it will seem easier. I kind of wish I had drawn my scale in charcoal rather than pencil, as the graphite was so shiny on the black side and faint on the other, it was hard to take a picture of. Charcoal seems easier to go from very dark to very light, with many gradations in between.

The most important discovery I had was how you really can mix the paints to get a pretty good black. I know that many painters shun using blacks that come from a tube, and always mix their own from other colors, since it's so rare to see actual blacks in nature. I had to play with my mixture a little bit to get it looking black-ish, but the end result turned out pretty well. It's not the deepest, darkest black, but that's probably a good thing.

As stated above, the most important thing I learned from the videos would be the superiority of cyan and magenta over blue and red. When the "historic" primaries were used (blue, red, and yellow), the orange, purple, and green all seemed too dark. As seen in the video and in my picture, the "real" primaries created much better secondaries. Would the "red" that was created from magenta and yellow make a better orange if mixed with the yellow than the "historic" primary red did?

The Otis College video about creating a value step scale seemed a little too complex for the simplicity of the exercise. It seems like teaching someone to sharpen their pencil with an exacto knife should be in a more advanced how-to video. Also, he was covering up his shaded in boxes with a piece of paper, so as not to smudge them. It seems like that would make the project more difficult, as you wouldn't be able to compare the square you're working on to the one you just finished. I preferred the color wheel video, which was more about the heart of the matter, not about trying to be funny or overly complicated.