FAQ’s & Regular Answers
Introducing Our Most Often Asked Q’s ‘Regular Answers Feature’
This is where you can browse the most common questions new and improving artists tend to ask for help with:
To kick start this feature I have put together an short article to give you some confidence to take on what can often feel like being ‘stuck’ with colour mixing.
Colour – One of the most often asked questions by beginners and improvers taking up art is :-
How Do I Know What Colours To Mix And How?
Introduction: How is your colour vision?
The Ishihara Test for colour vision – check it out online. Do a search for items on Ishihara colour testing and find the charts they created around 100 years ago.
This system for testing colour blindness has been around for many years and certainly was around when I was at art school in the 1960s. It was then and there that I discovered I could see many colours clearly and the test enable me to see more as the test got harder than most of my illustration fellow students. It has remained that way all my life but I would also stress that I have done a great deal of experimentation with mixing colour and studied the way colours resonate or not depending on which colours are combined. This is the first most important thing in my opinion as the more I literally look ‘into’ rather than ‘at’ colours, the more my brain seems to resonate with each mix. You will see for sure some of the more obvious examples which I share in my various information documents, but for now, lets start with the most obvious question for you now – how is your own colour vision?
It is not unusual for new hobby artists or art students to discover they may be slightly or heavily colour blind with some colours. I stress here that this need not stop them from pursuing art, yet it does to some extent determine what they choose to pursue if colour is critical to their work. I won’t list all limitations here as there is no need to assume that colour blindness means you cannot become an artist at all, as it depends what colours are involved, the job you regularly do (such as electricians where colour coding is exact and needs to be easily recognised), or whether you will be a drawing only, or painting only, artist. It is perfectly possible to work in black and white or shades of grey, such as in illustrations created in pencil, black ink or other mark making monotones, that could be a fulfilling route to creative artwork. If you are interested in the Ishihara test, take a look online and google Ishihara Colour Test to find out more. I look at it every now and then, just to check my colour vision which happens to be functioning very well so it reassures me with regard to my choices and use of colour. One of my fellow art school friends who was also training in illustration discovered during her first semester that she was very colour blind and so she changed her focus from colour work to greyscale and black and white imagery, then cleverly applied colours that she saw more accurately. Her work was compelling and very commercial. She went to art school partly because she found colour mixing difficult, but had not realised it was because of her challenges with colour vision. In any event, it did not change the fact that she was a very talented natural artist and could draw exquisitely. Even without her natural level of skill, she was determined to follow her dream to be a full time artist and she succeeded in that. Today there are special glasses available to correct some colour blindness as the advances in science have been so great.
The message here is not to give up on yourself if any of the elements and materials you will be working with, prove to be a challenge. Colours and the number of combinations you can mix with them are endless, so don’t overthink this subject when you start or are already mixing colour for your artwork.
For Simple Exercises in colour mixing, using water-based paint for best drying times, see our Go-To Tips (GTT) page during October for beginner artists, where we guide you in a series of exercises on how to save your mini-experiments in mixing Colour and take you to the more advanced stages of this practice. A must for beginners and improvers.
It’s always worth checking our GTT page to see our regular guides for beginners and improvers.
Email us for info on arty ‘stuff’ you feel stuck with and we will do our best to include your query in the topics I will cover on the GTT page.