Colour Theory with colour pencils

My last studio workshop delved into colour theory with colour pencils as our medium. It was a fairly intensive session with everyone working hard and absorbing my dialogue.

We began by filling in a blank colour wheel with 3 primaries and then made the secondary and tertiary colours from these. The tertiaries need a bit of care when layering, the right order is vital, so that the correct colour is established, as in yellow green and blue green.

Discussion continued to the complementary colours, split complementaries and analogous colours schemes. Then a bit of in depth study on the words used to describe colour - hue, value and chroma. In a nutshell, you have to get the value and the chroma correct, the colour is secondary.

We then set about doing some exercises using just 3 primary colours. This is a useful task to set yourself to accomplish as it teaches you a great deal about colour simplicity. If you are tempted, I have a step by step tutorial on colouring an apple available here on my website.

From this lesson, I drew a pumpkin from the 3 primaries that are used in printing, that is magenta, cyan and yellow. The variety of colours from these 3 is quite wide. I had to use the white of the paper to lighten values. An interesting exercise. I would love to hear if you try it too!