Colour titrations

When my gal was at college doing chemistry, one of the bits of lab work she really enjoyed was titrations "the process of determining the quantity of a substance A by adding measured increments of substance B". It appealed to her sense of order and her enjoyment of methodical process, a thing she has inherited from me (though you might not think so looking at our housekeeping skills!!)

I have been doing a year's course with Christine in Studio 11 looking at colour: how colours react with each other; how to mix colours; tone, shade, saturation (intensity); all of those things that help one understand why colours do or don't work together and what their impact is on each other. It has been a very rewarding year. Our most recent exercise was looking at how mixing complimentary colours affects the saturation of the starting colour, using pre mixed liquid dye paints. I began with a vibrant green and used scarlet in various quantities to modify. It was intentionally rather unscientific, simply starting with a pure colour and mixing in small amounts of the complimentary to see where it went. We tried to keep all the mixes very close in tone, so the square looked homogenous, not entirely successful in my case as some are too dark. We created three 4x4 grids with our colour mixes, using the same pattern on each grid and leaving one square uncoloured. In this we painted a fully saturated, full strength patch of our starting colour, a much paler version of this and a full strength patch of the contrast colour. This gave us an idea of how the pure colours contrasted with those we had mixed; whether that contrast was harmonious, quiet or dynamic. 

A cool green modified with warm scarlet

Since then, I have been doing more experiments with this idea; creating greens with the warm and cool blues and yellows (royal blue/golden yellow and turquoise/acid yellow), then modifying these with warm (scarlet) and cool (magenta) reds. The warmer blue and yellow make a pretty muddy looking green, almost brown before one even starts, so there is much more brown in the top two sets, mixed with scarlet (warmest) and magenta. The cool blue and cool red sends the blends a little bit more towards grey (third mix down), a devilishly elusive colour to find. Every painted square taught me a little bit more.

Then I got into "titrating" experimentation mode. I have a wonderful little set of measuring spoons, which give me a dash, a pinch and a smidgen; respectively 1/8, 1/16 and 1/32 of a teaspoon each: brilliant for measuring out small portions of dye powder when mixing up dyes. I used the smidgen and spooned out tiny quantities of liquid dye into a mixing pot, so I knew what proportions of primaries I was mixing to get the tertiary colours

First the greens, using turquoise, royal, acid and golden. You can see the proportions carefully recorded so I know what I did in future.

Then purples

and finally the oranges

So I now have a wonderful rainbow of colours to give me at least some idea how those dyes will mix with each other. The process is, of course, dependent on my always mixing up the pure dyes with the same proportion of dye powder to liquid, but this is a pretty good guide to how they all work together, and gives me huge pleasure too. I shall take it along to my next Studio 11 class to get Christine's comments about the primary colours and what proportion of dye to liquid she uses for each. Different colours tend to be more or less dominant, so one has to adjust one's teaspoons (or smidgens) to suit.

All this mixing was, of course, much helped by music, in this case several playlists of early music and folk, set to shuffle on the iPad, singing out through my Bluetooth speaker, so I could listen for as long as the process took.

Having my converted garage space for these experiments is an enormous boon and one I am endlessly grateful for.