Blog 4: Art Material Exploration 1: Exploring Value and The Subtractive Color Theory

1. I thought it was interesting creating the Value Scale and Color Wheel. The Value Scale was easy to set up, but surprisingly difficult to control the shades. It was hard for me to find a rhythm using the charcoal seeing as it is not a tool I normally use. The feeling of the charcoal against the paper bothered me. The Color Wheel is fun. As I am an education major, we often use color mixing with children as young as toddlers and have them exploring color combinations like this. It was interesting for me to start with the magenta, cyan, and yellow and to use acrylic paints.

2. I preferred the paint over the charcoal. Painting can be so therapeutic and it was fun to mix the colors together to create a new color.

3. The most important discovery in the creation of these studies was the idea of using cyan, magenta, and yellow rather than just blue, red, and yellow.

4. The Value Scale video explained a lot. Creating a gradient can take a lot of time and patience like the one in the video. He was very precise about everything he did from preparing the scale to sharpening and filing the pencils. Although I tried this a couple times, I was unable to produce the look of even and consistent steps as he explained in the video.