Composing and Drawing Tip of the Week.

December 13, 2014
 

During the holiday season, I will be revisiting some of the initial Tips from over a year ago.  I will resume preparing new Tips for you January 3.  Meanwhile, for this weekend, enjoy this little exercise for sight-reading color:

Sight-reading is the musicians' skill for reading and playing music they may not have seen before.  One way to learn sight-reading is to sing the notes of randomly selected phrases.  We can learn to see and identify color using a similar method, but with seeing and naming rather than seeing and singing.   

 

Artists often have problems mixing a color they're looking at, especially if it's neutralized.  Add to that, the same color distributed over a large area will appear differently in selected parts of that area depending upon light, shadow and other colors reflecting within it.  For example, our eyes will see multiple colors on a red car parked under a large magnolia tree on a sunny, Spring afternoon.  We might not see any of the original red color formulated by the factory who painted the car.  

 

If we can learn to sight-read color, we can eliminate the guessing game from our color mixing process.  Try this little exercise:

  1. Look around you and locate a large area painted a single color.
  2. Curl your index finger so that it touches your thumb, forming a little peephole about 3/4 inch in diameter.  (We'll call this an isolator.)  
  3. Close one eye, extend your hand about half arm's length from your face and with your open eye look through the isolator at any area of the solid color.  Stare for at least five seconds. 
  4. Now, move your isolator a few feet in any direction and stare at that area for at least five seconds.  
  5. Compare the two areas. 
Now, here's where we get into trouble, but not if we compare according to hue, value and intensity.  For this week's tip, we'll compare just hue.   
You know that hue is a color's name.

 The twelve major hues are yellow, yellow-orange, orange, red-orange, red, red-violet, violet, blue-violet, blue, blue-green,  green and yellow-green.  Using only one of the  twelve hue names listed, identify the hue you see through your isolator in each of six areas you find of something painted a single color.  Hint:  the hues you see might not be the color you think it is.

 

Have fun with this.  You might discover something surprising.

 

Happy Sight-reading,

 

Dianne

P. S.  After Christmas, watch for my announcement about my weekly video tutorials coming online in February.  These will be available to download for a small fee, but you will continue to receive these weekly newsletters free!

P.P.S.  Join us on the Facebook forum where there are now twenty-two challenges.  You can do any challenge at any time.  They are there for your enrichment and enjoyment.  If you post your results, be sure and do so in the comments portion of the challenge to which you responded so as to keep the responses with their corresponding challenge.  I will continue to add challenges from time to time.

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