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| Primary and secondary triads with watercolor pencils. |
One of many interesting ideas in the book Exploring Color Workshop is one I followed up on right away: Keeping a color journal. As I mentioned in my review, I am constantly experimenting with various triads and color combos, but I have the bad habit of scattering swatches, notes and ideas next to the trial sketch or wherever I had space on a sketchbook page. Referring to them again means going through several sketchbooks to find them. I don’t know why I had never thought of it myself – putting all such experiments into a single, dedicated journal is so much more useful! I wish I had started it a couple of years ago when I first began thinking about color more seriously, but it’s never too late.
Shopping my own stash, I found an 8-by-10-inch Stillman & Birn Beta sketchbook that was just waiting for a purpose. (The tooth is good for both wet and dry media, and the paper’s weight and sizing have always served my wet media needs sufficiently.) I began by documenting my current primary and secondary triads in colored pencils. Next were my watercolor mixing experiments from Kathleen Moore’s class.
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| Sorry, you won't find neatly gridded color-mixing tables here -- just my usual sloppy swatches. But on a practical matter, I find these mixed-on-the-paper swatches more informative than mixes thoroughly blended on the palette first. |
My color journal serves another need that just came up: Kim had mentioned on Instagram that she’s taking Ellie Doughty’s Stylized Landscape Sketching class at Gage Academy. Sharing her class exercises, Kim said the lesson was to choose two complementary colors plus one analogous to make sketches in various saturations of the chosen hues. That’s an interesting idea that I’d like to try sometime – but where do I record the idea so that I’ll remember it again? Now I have a place: I jotted it on the inside front cover immediately.
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| I scribble ideas to try on the inside front cover. |
As I work through some of the exercises in Exploring Color Workshop, I’ll do them right in the journal, which is large enough to write notes on the same page as the exercise.
I don’t have many entries to share yet, but I hope to eventually. Do you keep a color journal? If so, please share ideas on how you use it!
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| My color journal cover is just the right place for my rainbow-themed stickers. |
You'll have your own reference book. Cool! I'm too lazy and never get organized like that. I should experiment with color mixes more, especially when I find a new color I like.
ReplyDeleteI love keeping this journal! You know how geeky I am about my materials. ;-)
DeleteI love color! Sometimes I think I draw things just so I can add color to them. I also love experimenting with color combos, materials, etc! I get the best ideas from your blog……….
ReplyDeleteCathy I
Always good to know a fellow color junkie! ;-) Maybe you'll be inspired to start a color journal, too!
DeleteI too have a color notebook! I love mixing the colors right on the page as well. Either in circles or blobby squares, hah! Those grids I've seen others make are beautiful, but I just don't have the patience for it. Sometimes I just like to play with my colors seeing how far I can push a mix in either direction just for fun! Which sometimes ends with inspiration for a painting, but sometimes not! At least I was being creative and playing with my paints! 😊 I also have a notebook for all of my different brushes with about a page of each showing all the different brush strokes I want to get out of it.That one was fun to make, though it needs some updating!
ReplyDeleteOh, I love your brush journal idea! I have many, many pages of pen strokes (from my fountain pen days), marker swatches, colored pencil swatches... but everything is scattered in so many books.
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