My fourth painting class assignment was to make a color wheel of equal values. I had a rough time with it…
I labored over my values, trying to make them equal. As you can see, one of the blues stands out too much. It’s not even the right color. It’s supposed to be a transition from the blue hue to the green hue. I thought the rest were pretty close if you don’t count the yellow. Our instructor told us not to worry about the yellow, but to make all the other colors of equal value to each other. I ended up having to start over on a new canvas.
Several times I have had an instructor take my brush or tool from my hand and manipulate the project I had asked for help with. The first time it had been a one day watercolor workshop and the teacher took a razor and scraped away color from the simple seascape I had been working on. I had left no white paper to show up as whitecaps on the water. Leaving the white of the paper to work as highlights or simply to represent white in a picture is a key element of watercolor painting. Anyway, this guy scraped my painting to cut away some blue in the water to convey foamy waves. It was the weirdest thing to me. Maybe I’m over sensitive, but I was very offended he did not just tell me what I could do. My current painting instructor has crossed that boundary twice. It won’t happen again.
On a previous post I show the wooden duck decoy we painted for my third class. My rendering is pretty accurate and the instructor wanted to see me loosen up and not blend the paint, but allow a freer, more painterly application. When he was giving me his critique, he took my brush and very quickly painted in the unfinished background around the ducks head. It was nice, but I felt a little offended. I wanted the background darker, so I ended up blending his brushwork into the smooth shadows you see in my posted image. He returned later to exclaim, “What did you do to my work?!” I just looked at him. I am what I am. Loosening up comes after learning the basics.
Which brings me to my color wheel. I was barely finished with six of my twelve hues and struggling with their values, when the other students were finishing up. The instructor came over to look at my progress and I explained my frustration with my color mixing. I had six hues with pretty close values applied to my canvas. He looked at my blue, picked up my palette knife and scraped off as much paint as he could and deposited the blue paint lower on the wheel. He said I had it in the wrong place. I now had a dark blue stain where the blue-green was apparently supposed to go. The problem was, the blue-green was already placed on my wheel higher up. I now had this large gap to close between the two adjacent colors. He was wrong. That move screwed me up. For the rest of the class and later when I got home to finish, I fretted over that stupid gap and how to resolve it. I didn’t. I finally decided to scrape each color off carefully and applied it to a new canvas. Unfortunately, I really didn’t remember how we were supposed to work the different colors into each other. So, what you see is yet another failure. But failure is knowledge.
I am going to start over again. This time I have a reference photo the instructor sent me to compare my piece to. I will use darker values. It will be good.
I mixed all my colors first.
