Sketchbook Day 11 - mixing colours

Welcome to the colour week. Here are a few of the objects I collected that seemed to relate well to my original plum colours. I chose just a few - tea shirt, a hollyhock flower, gone-to-seed lettuce, grasses and leaves of a flower I can't name. 

I decided to limit the colours even further, choosing the hollyhock flower, the plum and tea shirt and gathered my favourite colouring media - chunky Stabilo pencils that are water soluble and a Koh-i-Noor paint set. I experimented to find the different colours that I needed to mix to get the correct colours so these could be kept ready to hand for the rest of this week.

The close-up image below shows the richer colours on one page and the lighter ones on the other. I built the colours up in layers, quite thickly to get the darker ones and found it tricky to get just the right range. I used a wet paint brush to blend the colours on the right page, but used the white crayon to blend in the lighter colours on the left. I also scratched back through the layers with a scalpel - idea seen at the Water Colour exhibition at Tate Britain last weekend.

An accidental discovery was made when the wet area on the right was closed down onto the left page, giving a pale 'print' - just perfect in this case.

TODAY'S TASK - Cover a couple of pages with colours that relate to your chosen objects. Use any media you like including fragments of fabrics and a few stitches perhaps? You can separate your colours onto the two pages by either placing all the dark, rich colours to one page and the lighter colours on another or placing all warm colours (reds, browns, oranges, together and all cold colours (blues, greens) together.

To get 'just the right colour' build up layers on the page rather than in a palette. This will enable you to 'scratch back' for texture and patterning.

TODAY'S TIPS -  Limit your chosen colours as you will find that there is a huge range even within something that looks very limited on close study.

Experiment with what order you stack your colours. Can one colour be used as a blender or can you do this with a wet paint brush?

Softer colours might be better added to a damp page.

Colour study based on the colours in poppies - now long disappeared from the garden of course, but still recorded in a previous sketchbook.