Do you remember learning penmanship in elementary school and being made to write out the alphabet over and over? I do. I didn’t find the process to be tedious at all. Take your time, examine each element, go slowly… and you end up with a beautiful rendition of mankind’s most meaningful symbol set.
If color is the artist’s alphabet, then I am in elementary school again. The first assignment in Color Theory was to make a 12-hue basic color wheel from the 3 primaries, red, blue, and yellow.
There were many possible pitfalls, but the teacher was good about advertising them to us in advance. How much water to mix with the acrylic (the ideal consistency is best described as “buttery”) and equal color equivalents between primaries (the secondaries) and between secondaries (the tertiaries) – simply put, the eye should be able to move smoothly around the circle, pulled with equal strength from hue to hue.
An additional aspect of this assignment was design. The tiles did not have to be squares, the teacher said, but accurate color was more important to the grade than creativity. In other words, be careful about overachieving.
My mind’s default setting is “overachieve,” and it serves me quite well most of the time. I felt deflated by this teacher’s comment, though. Was there really any reason to go the extra mile on this? It’s just a color wheel – a fundamental, formulaic exercise.
In Fundamentals of Design the next day, we talked about taking control of our education. It goes like this: the teacher assigns 1, 2, 3. You fulfill those requirements, and you bring the 4, 5, 6.
Color Wheel: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I was inspired again.
I’ll scan and post my final wheel (not the photos above) when I get it back next week, so you can see my 4, 5, 6.