Color theory, color mixing and arrangement for polymer clay
First we arrange them into the color wheel. Then you will learn something about how colors are mixed and which mixing method we use in polymer clay. Gradually, we will mix through shades of color from three primary colors across the color spectrum.
You will find that polymer clay has features that make mixing of colors not perfect. Fortunately, we still can work with this to achieve desired color.
Colors can be arranged in different ways, e.g. into groups – color families by dominant color hue.
Simple and useful arrangement is color wheel. The wheel help you to understand the relationship between the colors easily. Colors are arranged in sequence as in the color spectrum (like you can see them in the rainbow).
You can easily find that neighboring colors are similar. And the further colors are from each other, the more different they are.
The beauty of color wheel is, that a lot of color hues you are missing you can create by mixing two of adjacent colors in the wheel. The resulting shade can be easily assumed.
If you try to make color wheel from polymer clay, you will find that is not same as on the image. Below you will find out why.
Let’s take a look at some part of theory to get better idea how colors works.
We distinguish two ways how we can perceive color, so we have two ways of color mixing:
Additive mixing is used for light. Light is emitted and you see colors on your telephone, TV, other screens.
At the beginning you have dark without any light. When you will combine lights of primary colors (Red, Blue, Green) you will obtain white.
Subtractive mixing is used by pigments. That’s what we are interested in. It is color, which we perceive as a feature of solid objects. It’s a print from a printer, oil painting or color of polymer clay.
When we mix all primary colors (Blue, Magenta, Yellow) together, we get black (in ideal conditions).
We will deal with subtractive mixing within polymer clay.
Color mixing works flawlessly in a perfect world. For example you get black by mixing primaries – basic colors. But have you noticed, that you buy a black color for the printer separately? Our world is not perfect and the colors are not too.
Polymer clay pigmentation is not perfect also. In the text below are some tips how to deal with it.
Let’s go back to the start of mixing. Back to three colors that you can’t mix from anything, but you can mix everything from them. We call them primary colors.
Primary colors are blue, magenta and yellow. Primaries are colors, which can’t be mixed from another. By mixing each primary color with each one you get secondary colors.
Your choice of primary colors define whole color range, which you can create.
Someone prefer combination of blue, magenta, yellow. Other change blue for turquoise or magenta for red. It also depends on polymer clay brand, they can have different blue, magenta and yellow.
FIMO professional is used in this article. Color mixing results could be slightly different with other polymer clay brands, but theory works same.
Secondary colors include purple, orange and green. They are formed by mixing two primary colors.
When you arrange the primary and secondary colors in the color wheel, you can proceed with mixing the adjacent colors. We always mix one primary and one secondary. Result is tertiary color. This way of mixing neighboring colors in color wheel can be used to infinity.
Tertiary colors are blue-violet (indigo, ultramarin), purple, red, sunflower yellow (saffron), light green, blue-green (emerald).
Polymer clay are variously pigmented, some polymer clay colors have more pigments then others. If you mix yellow and magenta (red) in a ratio of 1:1, you usually not get bright medium orange. Rather it will be darker orange.
This is a common phenomenon, it will happen to you also with green or purple, which may be more bluish or vice versa pinkish. You can observe shifts in color shades
Often apply, the darker the shade is, the more pigment have. Sometimes it happens that you mix the expected “middle” shade when you mix light and dark at a ratio of 2:1. Sometimes you will need add more of light color to get “middle” color.
Here you can see primary blue, secondary green and tertiary blue-green.
The difference between blue-green and blue is distinctive, whereas blue-green and green are minimal.
Hue, according to these rules, is much closer to green than to blue, it is not the “medium” shade we would expect. To get a balanced blue-green, we need to add much more blue.
Blue-green, which visually corresponds to balanced blue-green is mixed from blue and green in a ratio of 10: 1.
Display on axis:
If we imagine mentioned colors on the color axis (or in the color wheel). It would be like this:
If we look at the colors according to the ratio in which they are really mixed, then the blue-green axis looks like this:
Mixed colors are always less saturated than colors directly from block of clay. If you mix a whole palette from primary colors, you will soon find that mixed color, e.g turquoise or red, is not as bright as the one from block of clay from the manufacturer.
You can use this with ease. If you miss some color, you can mix it. When you need a bright color, take it from a block. If you need muted color, don’t be afraid to mix it.
Black and white are not in the color spectrum. White is a lack of color, and black is ideally the result mix of all colors – for example, all primary colors. You may have noticed that this doesn’t work in the real world. You get brown or another muddy color by mixing all colors instead of black. Therefore keep both white and black always in stock.
We’ve been mixing only the neighboring colors of color wheel to create new color. We didn’t mix with white or black nor with colors, which aren’t adjacent. We’ll talk about this next time and you can be sure that we will use color wheel again.
Tento příspěvěk je také dostupný v jazyce: Čeština
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