This weekend I ran a One Colour Challenge in my facebook group, Creative Hands Tribe.
We were exploring just how many tones and variants of one colour can be made by adding tiny amounts of black, adding white, then adding white to the darkened colours, and so on....on and on!
It really is amazing to see the range of tones and shades that can be made from just three tubes of paint!
Using the colours we made a pleasing page, of no purpose other than to simply play and explore.
Next we repeated the process with a different tube of the same colour. So I had started with a Cadmium Red, so I then repeated the exercise with a Pthalo Red to see how it varies...come and try it with me sometime...the results are really surprising!
We played around and really looked at what we liked and disliked. Then we finally added a tiny touch of our chosen colours complimentary (opposite) colour to see what effect that had on the page! Wow...it all springs to life!
Alongside this we did a photo colour forage around out one colour. This hones the observation and we started to journal around our associations with the colour. I suggested that, if feeling low or tired, to work with a favourite colour...a sure pick-me-up! If wanting a challenge, to work with a colour we have a difficult relationship with, to explore those feelings and see if we can find the love in it!
I chose red. Hot and uncomfortable, it speaks of danger, blood, poisonous mushroom , bold summer flowers, passion, root chakra, dynamism, eye catching. I'm often told red paintings don't sell, but I recently visited my mother in law, for her birthday, who adores red and anything to do with red poppies. I find it hard to colour match reds and it feels hard and pushy to me.
In my pleasing page, here, I found a warm, lively pinky coral colour which really suprised me! I loved it and I would not have expected to love it at all. It's not a colour I have ever been attracted to, until I made it myself and painted with it.
Isn't it interesting how our feelings change through the direct connection and experience of a thing?
There's lots more to come on colour, but here are some of the examples of colour play from star pupil Karen.
It's so liberating to just play with paint and colour for the pure experience of exploration...do give it a try!
KM 19/7/21
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