Color Class | Spring 26
Alas, the class that never was. Here are the 1.5 projects I finished for my color class before I had to medically withdraw from school.
Project 1: Color and Me
For this assignment we had to pick a color that feels personally significant to us currently, create a composition in that color, and write a brief reflection about how the color relates to the overall theme, etc. I chose green because it’s one of my favorites but I wanted the overall message of the image to be hope and growth.
We could pick whichever medium, but collage was highly encouraged. I decided to use a mix of mediums that I had experimented with in my time at school, including figure drawing, soft pastels and writing. I’d used a similar effect with the overlapping writing in my final project for Drawing II, which was sort of a callback because I had the same teacher in that class. That’s also why I challenged myself to draw a hand - she taught my figure class as well.
Project 2: Value Scales and Color Wheels
This has been surprisingly hard but has taught me some extremely valuable lessons. I can’t believe I had never mixed a color wheel from the primaries before now. We actually mixed our primaries as well to help show that even they come in warm and cool tones. We talked about color bias for awhile and then set to work.
Not only am I learning a ton about color and value from this project, it’s also my first time working with gouache paint. That in itself has been a lesson in patience. Gouache is like acrylic+ but it “activates” with water and will lift back off the paper. It dries quickly, so it works best to mix the paint on a slightly damp surface, which is strange. We used trays lined with wet towels with tissue paper on top. I actually sort of enjoyed using the ridges that would form to scrape my brush off or help pool the paint in one area.
Working on the grayscale felt.. . . not very joyful at all, because I hadn’t figured out the water to paint ratio. I also wasn’t using the wet tray hack, and it makes a huge difference. So far I’ve painted all the swatches for my color wheel, I just need to cut them out and glue them down.
