Tuesday Tips and Techniques: Experiment With Color

We all have our favorite palette of colors that we tend to gravitate to without even a thought.  Mix it up a little and choose colors that you wouldn't ordinarily use together or for a particular subject.  Now, I can assure you that you probably won't end up with your most beautiful pages, but, hey - you should be having some fun experimenting in your journal!

I was tired of lugging around large tubes of acrylic paints with me to class, so I picked up a 24 set of Reeves acrylic paints (why didn't I think of that sooner?).  I was browsing through the tubes of color Saturday evening, and flipped to the first page in my journal (which happened to already have been painted with left over paint from another project).  I really wasn't inspired by what I could see in the paint, so I decided to just experiment with some of my new tubes of paint.  I was really most curious to see what this "Flesh Tint" looked like.  Um....I don't think I've ever met or seen anyone with that flesh tone (I digress), but I had fun playing with it anyway.

It was fun overlapping colors using a limited palette.  I used no more than 3 or 4 colors plus white for any of these faces.  I didn't care about the final result or following the "rules".  I simply roughed in faces with a single paint brush and explored the color palette.

I think it's quite evident that I'm serious when I say I didn't care about the results!  Each woman grew more ugly than the previous one, but what I had was FUN!  I also learned some things about moods and color.

I hope you'll open up your journal and paint just to paint.  Paint a series of something using different color palettes.  Paint faces, or pears, or trees, or butterflies....   You get the picture!  Don't worry about backgrounds.  Don't worry about layering or composition.  Don't worry about having a pretty page. Just experiment with the paint and have some fun!