At the moment, our You Tube Quick Tips (225-230) are exploring Charting Values & Intensities. Once all the videos are published (over the next three weeks), folks will have an invaluable set of exercises that can hone the eye and boost confidence controlling values and
intensities.
Understanding the science of how color works can take the guessing out of reading and mixing the colors you want.
With trial and error eliminated, when you run out of a desired color mix you've found, you'll always know what to do to create it again. So taking the time and patience to do exercises (such as color charts) is well worth the effort in the long run.
Color Wheels-- like this one that shows how compliments neutralize each other in varying degrees--can tell us a lot
about color, but they don't give you the actual experience of mixing unless you create your own wheel. Neither will a book or video on color theory go very far unless you put your hands to work. Imagining it just doesn't get the job done.
We could have done this exercise in a single video, but I believe that presenting small chunks of teaching, each
focused on a single task, will go further towards making the experience a learning exercise. So that's what we've done.
The six lessons focus on three sets of compliments: blue/orange, yellow/violet, and red/green, in that order. Each
odd numbered Tip concentrates on the color mixing for getting ready to chart that set and each even numbered one guides your creating the chart.
Charts are a waste of time without a goal. The goal of these charts is to control values of each
mixture so that in each column, values are each the same visual distance apart, and to control intensities (chromas) so that in each row, each change in intensity is equal as it moves from fully saturated to fully neutral.
To be able to control both value and intensity at the same time is a skill, one which you will build if, for each complimentary set, you are
successful meeting the goal. If the first effort doesn't succeed, then trash it and do another chart. If the second one fails, analyze WHY it failed and try to correct that in another. If it takes doing a dozen charts of the same set of compliments, then that's what it takes. Do it!
This is why it takes patience and time. But so does mastering any skill.
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