A Color Wheel

 

It looks like I will have a class next week, as I have now three people signed up for the color class at the JSAC.  There are only four meetings, two hours a piece, which limits the time I have.  I picked out two projects, which we can spend two weeks on each, all based on college 2D color projects I used to do with classes, so I know they work. Of course, those were done as projects involving colored acrylic paints, and the boss wants me to do this with color pencils.  This is not something I favor, but they are the ones who are promoting it, so maybe they know what will work for the students we are trying to get.  I do know that the other color classes that were set up for me to do did not make enrollment.   I don't know if that was the materials or the schedule (those were to be on Saturday afternoons), but I just do what is asked.

I figure it would be a good idea to have a color wheel to help explain basic color mixing theory, and that is something I can do in advance, and have to show them.  They can probably learn more by doing it themselves, but with a limited time to work, this is one thing I can do in advance, and if they want to make their own later, they can.  This will be one simpler than the one I made in 2D class, but good enough for our purposes.  Primaries, secondaries, and intermediates, which will get them through the projects, and what they would likely find if they bought one, or found one in a book.  And I even had some colored pencils in the basement, from a Christmas present I got a few years ago.  I retrieved those pencils, part of a 50 pencil set I had received.  Yesterday I decided to try making a color wheel with those primary colors and white, the minimum needed for a wheel.  Maybe they are low quality, but they didn't mix well.

So today I tried option #2, use my watercolors to make a wheel.  It's a task and material I've worked with in numerous intro classes, so I have some experience with it.  As I would have done with the pencils, I skipped the tint part of it, just going with the 12 hues. I scribed a circle at home this morning, in case I couldn't find an appropriate circle to trace in my Studio, and everything else was in my car.  Left late morning to get up to Ocean Grove, and brought in my backpack and my watercolor bag.  I know from the prints I colored in recent months that I had enough watercolors to do what I wanted. 

As I arrived, I met Andy, who said he was a new handyman type, recently hired, and wanted to see the inside of my Studio.   Why not?  So he looked around (mostly by the heater), made notes in a notebook, and moved on.  Molly had been there over the last week, creating even more of a mess if that is possible, but also leaving some  discs.  I guess she got tired of just listening to the radio.  I had brought a home burned disc with me, some soundtrack albums from David Lynch films- Fire Walk with Me, and most of Wild at Heart.  The latter I got around the time the movie was in theaters, a mix of original songs (instrumental) that were part of the movie soundtrack (mostly by long time collaborator Angelo Badalamenti) and a few lyric songs from outside sources, a mix of previously recorded songs, and commissioned songs.  The former album was purchased around the time I saw the movie on cable, well after it was released, a sequel of sorts to the television series that had originally aired in the late 1980's.  I had read a review which referred to it as a previously unseen genre- horror jazz.  Probably accurate.  A very strange film, but then so was the eventual tv sequel, which came (as originally promised), about 25 years after the original show.  Incredibly, most of the actors were still alive, though some died during production.  In any case, the music does fit together.

Results of today's work can be seen at the top of this post, exactly what I was expecting.  I'll go in with markers at home and label it as necessary.