Gradient colour mixing

Tags

colour mixing, Fimo, gradient, polymer clay, skinner blend

I mentioned in my previous post that keeping my colour recipes in percentages helped with mixing gradients.

Sometimes I don’t keep track of my gradient mixes. The one above is made up of coordinating scraps of colour…

which becomes a lovely skinner blend…

that ends up as beads.

At other times e.g. for the Art Bead Scene challenge pieces, I want my gradient to include specific colours to match the inspiration painting.

Here are my colour recipes using Fimo Classic:

• Brick = 25% bordeaux, 25% yellow, 50% white
• Rust = 10% bordeaux, 90% yellow
• Mustard = 2.5% bordeaux, 47.5% yellow, 50% white

I take my grid paper, and using 1 square to represent 10% of the recipe, I mark out the target colours. I leave spaces between them to allow for a gradient blend. I chose to put the bordeaux in the middle for the mustard colour on the right because it was such a small percentage I thought it would be difficult to cut accurately if it were on the bottom.

Then I mark diagonals for the blends. I chose to fade to white on the edges.

Then I cut out the paper shapes to use as a template for the clay.

Here is the resulting blend. I’ve included the target colours – there is a slight difference as the swatches have been baked while the blend is still raw. This method means I can mix the colours at the same time that I make the blend (instead of mixing the 3 colours separately and then blending them).

And here are the beads I made (with an additional magenta colour).

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Virtual Paintout – Thailand WIP

Tags

jungle, landscape, painting, path, polymer clay, polymer clay painting, skinner blend, Thailand, trees, Virtual Paintout

This month’s Virtual Paintout location is Thailand. It is a really interesting location and I wish I had more time to explore, but I haven’t even managed to finish the painting I started.

**Edit – I’ve now finished this painting.**

This is actually only the background half of my picture as I’m only just starting to work on the interesting bits (have a look at the original location to see what I mean). Here is a look at the work in progress.

As you can see the painting is pretty tiny – 10cm x 10 cm. I started off with 6 colour mixes (see the tiles to the right of the painting) plus black and white. I made some skinner blends to increase my colour variety as I haven’t managed to get them to mix nicely on the canvas (as I used to do with oils). The flowers are pure carmine from the packet.

I’m working on a thin sheet of pale blue polymer which has been baked, on which I’ve drawn pencil guide lines. I prefer to do the whole painting before curing as I often go back and change earlier bits as I progress but at this point I’m worried the uncured clay will crack if I don’t finish soon.

I still intend to finish this painting so there will be another blog about it eventually. In the mean time have a look at the flickr group to see some other finished polymer clay paintings.

I also need to work on my Bead Soup pieces – due 11 August. At the moment I have actually finished some pieces but they don’t use either the toggle or the focals I received (I received a LOT of beads!).

Yellow Eureka

Tags

colour mixing, Fimo, polymer clay, skinner blend, yellow

I haven’t paid much attention to colour theory or mixing, preferring to muddle my way through and recognise the right colour when I see it. However I have been getting frustrated trying to mix a nice juicy orange colour, and secondly my skinner blends from red to yellow have been disappointingly devoid of orange. So Carol Simmons’ post about Orange had several eureka moments for me:

Firstly how to get an even skinner blend by NOT using a triangle. And the second point is that yellow is slightly transparent. She is talking about Premo zinc yellow, but I have discovered the same applies to Fimo yellow.

2010 Easter Egg by C van Alphen

I made this Easter egg in 2010, the cane was made only from yellow, white and blends of yellow and white. The transparency of the yellow finally explained why the areas of pure yellow appear to be a slightly different shade, and somehow sunken into the surface of the pattern.

Plaquing visible in green clay mixed with high yellow content

Knowing what I was looking for I could even see the plaquing (circles that occur in transparent polymer clay once baked) in colour tiles where the mix had a large proportion of yellow.

Three baked colour tiles of yellow. The top one does not include white.

Carol recommends adding 1/8 or 1/16 white to the mix which I have done with the lower two tiles. The one on the left has 6% white (just under 1/16) and the one on the right has 12% white (1/8 rounded down). There is not a big difference between these two, but the tile at the top (which is pure yellow) is almost discoloured and seems insipid in comparison. There is also plaquing in the top tile but this is not so visible in the scan.

So now that I am able to give my yellow more mojo by including white, I have mixed my oranges again. The two tiles below have the same amount of red (10%) but the one on the right includes a small amount of white. I am amazed that although the one on the right actually contains less yellow (since it is part white), the hue appears more yellow. And it finally looks more like what I was after.

Two shades of orange with the same amount of red, but one with white.