One of the byproducts of being self taught is that you can’t entirely rely on being spoon fed information in the most logical order. Instead, you tend to search out bits and pieces to solve the current problem you have encountered along the way, usually because things don’t quite turn out how you’d hoped. On first glance this seems like a fairly inefficient way of going about things, but in terms of retaining the things you learn, experimenting and making mistakes may even help you to develop quicker than sitting in on a lecture or reading a book on the subject.
One area I personally needed to gain a better understanding was colour. I understood the basics of course such as yellow and blue make green, but green in itself can exist within a very broad range. How would I go about mixing the exact green I needed?
I have bestowed the virtues of Richards Schmid’s classic book ‘Alla Prima‘ already in previous posts, and another one of his great pieces of advice from that book was the process of completing a set of colour charts, an exercise designed to fully exhaust the possible colour mixtures available from the paints available.
The process involves mixing each colour methodically with all the other colours to see, understand and remember how they behave. Each mix is then blended with white and rendered out to five values.
Richard makes the point of not rushing, as it is through the process of creating these charts that you manage to grasp the full potential of your palette and learn to mix any colour required later on without guesswork.
This was not a quick job. I have a largish range of acrylics based on the Sundell Colour Wheel (from Acrylic Artist’s Guide to Exceptional Colour by Lexi Sundell) – a wheel designed to achieve exceptional colour in acrylics using single pigment paints to give the widest array of vibrant colour mixing options. The Sundell colour wheel consists of yellow, yellow-orange, red-orange, red, magenta, red-violet, blue-violet, blue, cyan, green, yellow-green, green-yellow, and to this I also added a couple of earth colours – burnt sienna and burnt umber – black and of course, white.
Starting with a chart made from unmixed paint straight out of the tube and continuing with charts based each single colour mixed with every other colour, I ended up with a total of 13 separate charts, each of which took about 2 hours to complete (while I did mix each colour with black and the earth colours on each chart, I only made full charts for the 12 Sundell Wheel colours).
This turned out to be a fairly exhaustive process and sure, I could have just skipped it all together and used the charts in Alla Prima as reference, but I honestly think it was what I learned by going through the process of creating the charts, not the end result of the charts that made the process all the more worthwhile.
This brings me back to the point I was trying to make at the beginning of this post, but which a quote on psychotactics.com explains better than I ever could:
Listening or reading something is just listening or reading.
It’s not real learning.
Real learning comes from making mistakes.
And mistakes come from implementation.
And that’s how you retain 90% of everything you learn.
From personal experience, I couldn’t agree more.
