Knowing what limited palette to chose when traveling is important. Making a new, twelve hue color wheel from a random choice of yellow, red and blue to play the color scheme game is both time consuming and rewarding. the color wheels provide both answers as well as questions.
Reds and Blues that don't mix to produce purples
While making sample wheels for the Color Scheme Game I ran into trouble trying to achieve purple, red-purple and blue-purple when I used Cadmium Red Light. The mix went immediately to brown or gray. I decided to do linear test strips showing gradual mixes of cadmium red with an assortment of blues.
Over the years I have skirted around the issue of choosing between cobalt blue and ultramarine blue, often thinking they are interchangeable. They aren’t. There is debate over the warm/cool nature of blues. I have read that French Ultramarine Blue is the coldest of blues. I don’t find that true at all. In my mind, the blues closer to green are cooler than the blues closer to purple. Purple is a warmer color than green. Ultramarine blue is definitely closer to purple than any of the other blues. The chart above, in my mind, proves that point of view. It is only Ultramarine Blue Light and French Ultramarine Blue that produce a hue close to purple when mixed with Cadmium Red Light.
On the other hand… Ultramarine Blue gives a much muddier green when mixed wit yellow than any of the other blues. Makes perfect sense to me since Ultramarine has more red in it. The red neutralizes the green. All of the other blues are closer to green. There is no red to neutralize the green. As a result, the greens are more vibrant.
It is easier for me to see the characteristics of the pigment when I make my color wheels with watercolor.
February 22, 2012 at 5:42 pm
Ultramarine definitely makes muddier greens, since you have to cut through closer to the center of the color wheel, where things become more grey, to get to yellow.
I agree that the greener blues are cooler. For example, cerulean on that chart is the coldest color there to me.
February 22, 2012 at 6:04 pm
I love working with a limited palette. It is actually how I was originally trained in school. A while ago I tried so many ways to get a “vintage” purple, and ended up using teal as my blue! It took a few weeks of testing to find it! 🙂
May 20, 2013 at 6:34 pm
With havin so much content and articles do you ever run into any issues
of plagorism or copyright infringement? My blog
has a lot of unique content I’ve either created myself or outsourced but it seems a lot of it is popping it up all over the internet without my authorization. Do you know any techniques to help protect against content from being ripped off? I’d genuinely appreciate it.
May 20, 2013 at 7:09 pm
I really don’t worry about it. It’s difficult enough to sell original content. If someone wants to steal it, eventually I will find out … or I won’t. If someone else can make money from my work it’s okay. If they make a lot of money, I’ll end up knowing about it and call them out for being fraudulent. After all, if they stole if from the internet, there is a date that you posted it on the internet that is prior to any date that anything stolen has been posted. My energy goes into being a better artist and posting new work. I can’t worry about those who want to focus on stealing the work of creative souls.