Beginning with the prepared grey background wash, I proceeded to pick all of the yellows, blues and reds from my acrylics and also my watercolour tubes, as the concentrated state of this paint is thick and opaque unless it needs a mix with white to make the colour more prominent on a darker page. As recommended, I made swatches of all the different tones of my primary colours, and then began procuring more combinations of the colours in a different order, and was surprised at how the same shade of colour might not look aesthetically pleasing next to another, in particular when lemon yellow makes an ochre yellow look horrible when next to each other on the page.
When having chosen my definite primary colours, which were ultramarine, medium yellow and scarlet, I then painted swatches of the colours merging into one another ( red to blue, blue to yellow and yellow to red) and found that the grey background sometimes quite challenging to work with, and so after the first scales, I then produced a second of all three on a dirtied tea washed page in order to see the gradients more clearly. However, as put in the exercise description, orange and green were achieved but the expected violet looked more like a dirty violet and so on both a dirtied and grey background, I used a combination of all my reds and blues in order to create as many shades as violet as possible, resulting in a range of dark pinks and blue- purples as well lilacs and dark violets. After this as an extension, I made a gradient of white to violet to black just to see how that kind a of scale would appear with a combination of both black and white being merged together using violet.
Finally, I made another gradient scale of the primary colours using white to create more opaque colours which created more muted colours with a weaker pigment, which created quite a yellow undertones in the blues and greens, and produced an off brown- violet for the gradient of red and blue.
SOPHIE FAWCETT'S OCA LEARNING LOG 