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0:08
Hello friends welcome back to my studio hope you're well it certainly feels good to be back in the studio I'm feeling like I have got the energy for it thank you for your patience for allowing me to have some time away if I'm not making any sense go back and have a look at my previous Vlog and that will update you it's it's called update um that will bring you up to speed to where I've been I actually got quite sick after the
0:36
funeral so um it's to be expected I'm not 100% but I'm doing as well as can be expected with what's G on so today I'd like to talk to you about these books that I mentioned that I got for my birthday color color mixing so there's a color mixing recipe book that I had had in a part on my wish list for a long long time and I watched a vlog by Laura Horn that she talked about a few color books some of her favorite books and this one was part of the mix and it got me
1:16
over the line I said yes why not I've wanted this for a long time I've got a birthday I'm going to get this book and then the other two books that she mentioned were these two books
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and I've really enjoyed them I got a lot out of them let's turn the camera around and I'll talk about the pros and cons of them and what I've found with them and what I've learned so let's look at this one first it is 1500 color mixing recipes oil acrylic and watercolor by William F pal and it's exactly as it says there's 1,500 color swatches and how to mix them in the different mediums and it also has
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sections on landscapes typical colors for landscapes for and for portraits where we go and it also comes with some charts for mixing up your own I'll keep it on the white so you can see it charts for mixing up the quantities a color mixing grid and also this little grid when he talks about one part of this and one part of that this is to help measure you and it's on a acetate sheet so you can
3:07
clean that off not sure that I would actually use that portion but it's good that it's there so other interesting things is where you can see the tinting value with when you've got obviously more white added in and less white what it does what gray does what black does all those sorts of things uh what else do I want to say about it the landscape colors I think a particularly nice range
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of colors and so each color has if I can not sure where the camera will pick that up but it has this is three parts white two parts lizar and Chism and one Parts INC yellow and that will give you this color here so while I was away on holiday I found this bowl in an OP shop and I didn't really need a bowl but I just loved these two colors and the way I would use this book is while you're learning about color obviously I can see that this has got uh orange tinged so I know it's
4:25
going to have yellow and red in it and and this is a little bit more pinky so it's going to have more red obviously they got white in it because they're quite tinted I also think this is going to have a little bit of yellow in it but the way I would use this book is I've just marked this page because I found this color here again I'm not sure how close the camera can pick that up that's a very
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good starting point it's not going to be exact but it's a very good starting point so I can see that this color here as a starting point to be able to mix this color has five parts white and a speck of Vermilion in it and this shows you here with less the what Vermilion is like on its own and then as you add white you get up to this heavily tinted color so the problem I have with this book is you
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know there's 1,500 versions of color in here and if you haven't got you know like this is another very close paint swatch to that color I don't have any CI and vilon in fact I don't have any Vermilion because I tend to not like that type of red so this book is only really useful if you've got a lot of paint colors if there is colors that you do like you could probably get close to this color with another type of red and and you know adding a bit of yellow in and a little bit
6:11
of white so yeah what I want to warn you about is while it can seem fantastic to have this book that has all of these amazing colors in it's certainly very pretty to look at you can get caught into buying way more paint colors than you actually need so lovely book good starting point perhaps to learn what what the different Blues what the different Reds how they behave how they mix and
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really more as an education rather than needing to go out and buy every color that any Paint Company produces so you can mix all of these colors good good starting point good reference the next book I bought from as I said from Laura horns Vlog on color mixing or her her recommended books this is the color scheme Bible by Anna starma and again it's a lovely book it I chose it because
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it has all of these really lovely suggested color palettes and you can see by them amount of Post-it notes that there are a lot of color palettes that I am inspired by and you know when you think about this bowl that I've just bought and see these colors these are in harmony because they're very close to each other in color and this is a great way to go okay well you can put these turquoisey
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fellow greeny colors and some neutrals with with it and then you've suddenly got you know from here and go I'll be interested in these colors and here's a suggestion of what will go with those colors so it's a really really great book and as you can see I've started to take notes on how you mix all of these colors what I did was I took a photo of each of these pages and I put it into the golden website they have a color mixing tool and I'll put some Stills up of that and basically
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you can upload a photo or reference photo and then put a dropper on each little area and it will give you a suggested recipe for how to mix that color now obviously what our I can see compared to what digitally can be seen it's not going to be exact it is definitely going to be just a reference but what I was able to find with say this these colors here this color palette here putting it into that
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guide was that color number one so this main pink color is titanium White tight Mars pale with some Queen Magenta in it and that will get me close to this color again what your eye the nuances that your eye can see that digitally you know taking a photo of this is already changing from what my camera can see to what the print is what would be lovely is to be able to put this page under some
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sort of sensor that that would um give the color would be a lot more accurate but anyway it's given me a good a good reference and then color number two which you know this is pink and this is a brown color but it has some Titan Mars pale some raw Sienna some bone black and some CAD orange gets you that that color and this one has number three has some bone black some Quinn magenta and
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some CAD orange and what I found the most most useful thing about putting this into that tool was seeing that when you look at this page the colors obviously these are all going to have red in them they're on that pinky range but interestingly this has got the Quinn Magenta in it this color and so that teaches us something about color mixing and that why they sit together is because what's in
11:01
this and this and this is also in this color and that helps that harmonize with this and that's why this Color Works in this palette so it's a great great thing to remember whenever you are painting to put a little bit this is when I talk about this hero color often called a hero color if you choose one color so for this one the common one of the common colors is this queen magenta so whatever
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color palette you end up going with if you choose one of your colors and you put a little bit or a lot of this same color into everything else on your palette all of that will harmonize in a painting all your colors will harmonize together and you can see further that number four here has the queen Magenta in it and also number five so out of these five colors four of them have the Quin Magenta in them so that's why this color palette is working so well and what I found
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interesting as I went through that happened every time I looked at a color palette and put down these colors to work out how to make these colors they all had a common color or two in them so with something that I already knew but it was really interesting to see that in action and so some of the other color palettes that I was drawn to these earthy ones it really has I really like these blues and it was interesting to bring in this soft yellow with those and so I
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haven't worked out what all had mix all of these colors it's interesting that this color keeps returning but yeah you get the idea it's got just an absolute ton of suggested color palettes and so I would highly recommend this book it's for Designing Home Interiors and so she talks about um that's what this panel here is the actual paint swatch that you get from the paint store but it's a great way to get a scheme of colors together for a painting and yeah as you can see
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there's just absolute this the way showing the way the Reds work in the interior but a vast majority the book is just full of color palette suggestions so if you're looking at different color palettes this would be a great one and the last book what is this one Spectrum Heritage patterns and Colors by tames and Hudson and it is a book that has tapestries or materials and then picking the
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color palette from that reference and um so it's Heritage patterns and colors that are found in tapestries I think mostly it's from tapestries and so it goes through the centuries starts at the 15th century so it gives this example of this tapestry and then it pulls out these colors that are in this tapestry now you can see I haven't got anywhere near as many Post-it notes but I've still got quite quite a lot and was interesting if I'll show you some of
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the ones I've flaged so the panels are arranged where it has a large portion of course of this green and red in here and smaller portions of these colors down here and I love how the image you get a really good size of the reference and a really good size of the panel and what it gives you is the printing color so you see myk colors to mix that color which you could put into that golden tool that I spoke about
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earlier and it was interesting this one I came across and it reminded me very much of a lot of Fang Go's color palette was often he used this yellow and blue tones together in his paintings and this one was interesting because it shows how close on the color wheel all of these colors are and you can see on a broad scale then when they're put down as an artwork in this case I think it's a wallpaper how in harmony those colors go so when you choose an analogous however
16:48
you pronounce that but it basically means colors that are close to each other on the color wheel so if I get the color wheel out you can see it is these sort of colors that are in this color palette and then this one of course is a monochromatic has a hint of the deep yellow again quite
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harmonious which I'm really wanting to move towards and then there's one that's a bit from all over the color wheel similar colors to what I've been using you know this Venetian red and the Violet violets I've been using the light orange is there and then it's um a little bit lighter than Prussian Blue but yeah you can see that this is quite similar to the color palette that I've been using recently this is a really lovely book to look at and
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I just love how it's got really big reference photos and really big color swatches to move on from yeah so I also really recommend this book so for building color palettes and understanding how colors work together I would choose these two and even though this was the one that was on my wish list I think I'll use this less and as you can see I've got nothing uh flagged in this and I've got all of these posted notes in these so that's that's very telling isn't it so
18:58
so the other thing that I have got available on my website is a chart of all of the mati colors cuz I tend to use mati uh cuz different paint companies call colors different things but based on the mati Range I've got a color chart available there that groups all of the colors into colors that have what I'm calling pigment families so all colors that would have a base Quinn Quinn Magenta in them or a titanium white in them or a raw Sienna mixed in them I've got a chart
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there free to download that can help you group the paints you already use help group them into colors that will go together because they share a hero color in that that they share a pigment a same the same pigment color which acts as a hero color so there we are that's what I've got to share with you this week and I'm a little bit Rusty so bear with me while I get back into the swing of things
20:14
I haven't been completely idle I haven't been out in the studio but I've certainly been watching a lot of other artists and getting inspired and taking lots of notes of things that I want to do and I've got some very exciting things to show you about using the gel plate and working on some smaller work so yeah I've got lots lots and lots of great stuff coming up I hope you'll join me but that is it for this week I hope you have a lovely week and I shall see you next week bye
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