Setting Up Proper Watercolors
Proper watercolors, tut tut! Last time I tried this things did not work out so well. The colors became a blur, the concept of mixing was lost on Lou, who was 3. Now Lou is 3.75 and I thought I would try again. Let me rephrase, she’s pestering me to paint constantly, so I thought it would be easier on all of us if she had an easy set up she could just pull out and use whenever she wanted to. I chose primary colors, but not horridly cheap and lame primary colors. I got my favorite. Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Yellow, and Cobalt Blue. I also used some plain Chinese White and a little Payne’s Gray. The Payne’s Gray is my answer to black, which is a testy color to work with. We began mixing. Red + yellow =
Orange. Then, by request, we mixed pink.
All the while she was asking what makes what and me explaining. Note how some orange is getting into the white. The merging of all paint begins. She wanted to work on this little folded piece of paper she made:
Ero was by her side doing his own mixing and painting using a tray.
Then Lou got into the Payne’s Gray.
Alas. Soon everything was dark.
But look at those colors, beautiful. This was two days ago. Today we set out the paints again, with a clean tray, to start anew. Payne’s Gray was uninvited. Lou was getting the color mixing. She would say “Blue and yellow make green” and so forth. But then, she began mixing brown, claiming she wanted to make brown. She wanted to mix all the colors. I tried to explain that red + blue + yellow = brown, but she just said “Yeah!” excitedly. So brown art it is. Also, we got her a little watercolor block of her own. It’s pretty dang cute. A watercolor block holds the paper down because it is glued on all sides. This prevents the water of the paints from warping the paper. They are lovely. I use them myself. April 23rd, 2010 | 4 comments |
4 comments to Setting Up Proper Watercolors |
 
    
 
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Heheh even as a little kid painting drove me nuts, because the colors kept mixing together like that, e.g., in not precisely the way I wanted. I remember being in kindergarten with the paints at those stand-up easels they had, and being like GRRRRRRR!
Looking back at the nature of the frustrations, the problem was that paints combine subtractively, where my mind was expecting colors to mix additively. “If I add all the colors together, I should get white.” Though on the other hand, this made picking up Photoshop and the like easy as pie later on.
I hadn’t thought about the color mixing in real life vs photoshop, it’s a another world isn’t it?
Right-o. The monitor shows red by emitting red light, green for green light, and yellow by emitting red and green light. The yellow is actually two separate wavelengths of light, red and green, but are clustered so close together that the neural feedback combines them into yellow.
A red pigment, on the other, shows red by absorbing every wavelength of light that is not red. Mixing in another pigment doesn’t exactly combine the two. Take green mixed with red, for example.
Pure white light shines on the mixture – a particular beam of light strikes a particle of red pigment – everything not red is absorbed – some of the red bounces back directly into your eye – some of the red is scattered into the rest of the mixture – red light hits green pigment particles, is absorbed – some green light scatters and is bounced back out – each bounce reduces the energy of the light beam. The various shades of reds and green come back to your eye. Some of these are clustered close enough to be read as one color, some not. That’s why it comes out as a weird, motley brown-not-brown color.
Yeah, that drove me nuts.
By contrast, if you take three lights with adjustable power, and put red/green/blue caps on them, well hey that might be interesting for your kids.
IIRC, I got around it by discovering pencils, chalk, crayons, which didn’t actually mix but went on top of each other. Thus I didn’t have expectations about them adding up.
Again, nobby makes my brain hurt! 8)