Lewis - The New Color Mixing Companion: Explore and Create Fresh and Vibrant Color Palettes with Paint, Collage, and Mixed Media--With Templates for Painting Your Own Color Patterns

Explore and Create Fresh and Vibrant Color Palettes with Paint, Collage, and Mixed Media

JOSIE LEWIS

I had the privilege of speaking to a nonartist group about the power of art and leading them in a watercolor exercise. After the lecture, a man in his 60s approached me. He was visibly moved, nearly weeping. He told me: I was in prison in my 20s, and they sent me to painting class. But the thought of art terrified me, and for the whole two weeks of the class I never even picked up the paintbrush. When I think about all the absurd risks I took in my life as a criminal, I just cant believe I couldnt take risks as an artist.

This story is profound for many reasons, but I think its all about identity. Making a choice to, say, rob and assault someone proves the robbers deepest conviction that he is the kind of person who needs to take value forcibly from someone else in order to have worth or to assert physical dominance to create an impression. That person is asserting his belief that thats all he has to offer. People take those kinds of risks willingly (to devastating consequences), but being faced with the generative and nonviolent act of creativity can be terrifying. Thats because making the choice to push past fear of failure and make something is embodying the powerful idea that you have something worthwhile to say.

Though this book is about color and painting in particular, its important to emphasize that creativity includes so much more than just visual art. We need creativity in literally every area of our lives. The basic function of creativity is releasing old solutions and generating new ones. Creativity is at the root of the scientific method, all kinds of technological advances, and every breakthrough, large and small, in every human effortranging from parenting to surgery. This book invites you to joyfully welcome and nurture your generative powers. You were born to be creative. Its one of the most essential human endowments. My ex-con made his first painting that day.

Opening up to the creative possibilities that call to you is risky. Your first attempts will be wobbly, like a newborn horse. But carry on, because you have something worthwhile to say.

So we know now that color is all an illusion (see Color Doesnt Exist, below), but Im basically obsessed with the color wheel. I love circles, I love rainbows, I love grids, and I love Sir Isaac Newton (16431727), who invented the wheel.

Ive been making color wheels and charts for years. I dont usually follow all the rules exactly, preferring instead to make a chart or a wheel that suits my subjective preferences. But in this case, I made a legit wheel. I attempted to mix the truest, wheeliest, rainbow-ist colors I could find. Ive been told with paint you can mix all the colors through the three primaries (red, blue, and yellow + white), but I havent found that to be the case.

Have you ever noticed how many shades of red are available in paint? Hundreds. Some are great for mixing orange, some are great for mixing purple, pinks, earth tones, flesh tones, etc.but Ive never found a single red that can do it all. So for this project I used two blues, one violet, one green, two yellows, and about six reds. (Red is a tricky one to nail downI havent found the Holy Grail red yet.)

See the opposite page for a breakdown of basic color terms I use in this book.

COLOR DOESNT EXIST

As usual, physics defies everything youve ever known to be true by indicating that color doesnt actually exist the way we usually think of it. Color, or rather the sensation of color, is an optical illusion based on reflected light. Color is actually more accurately described as texture. That is, every object has some sort of reflective surface. Depending on the type of surface, visible light will reflect off the surface of a thing in various ways and give us the impression of a color. Thus, color is not inherent to the object; the color is in the light between your eyeball and the object. White things have a very reflective surface and lots of light bounces off; black things absorb a lot of light. This basically means youve never actually seen the surface of any object, because the light from the object is interfering with your vision. To quote the movie The Matrix, Its the world pulled over your eyes.

Primary colors. Blue, red, and yellow.

Secondary colors. Purple, orange, and green. Each secondary color is a mixture of the two primaries shown on either side of it on the wheel.

Tertiary colors. Further in-between colors, seen here as pop-outs. A tertiary is made by mixing a primary and a secondary shown on either side of it on the wheel.

COLOR WHEEL GROUPINGS

Monochromatic colors. One or more value shifts of the same color.

Analogous colors. Two or more colors that are next to each other on the wheel. Shown at left: green, blue-green, and blue.

Complementary colors. Two colors that lie opposite one another on the wheel. Shown here: blue-green and red-orange.

Main Color Techniques: Around, Across, Up, and Down

I use a lot of different mediums, but Im usually trying to achieve one thingseamless color transitions. The glow. I love all things ombr, gradients, tiny stripes close together, pointillism in painting, neon radiance, traffic lights reflected on wet pavement, Mexican serape blankets, rainbows, and, naturally, the color picker in Photoshop.

There are three ways I shift colors. They are:

Around the Wheel

Across the Wheel

Up and Down Value