Color Theory

I have been playing around with polymer clay lately. It is a different medium than what I am used to so I decided to go about learning by following the book Polymer Clay Color Inspirations Techniques and Jewelry Projects for Creating Successful Palettes by Lindly Haunani and Maggie Maggio.

It is an interesting book that allows you to explore color as you learn to manipulate and mix the clay.

The first lesson was in Hue, Value and Saturation, the 3 properties of color. While learning to condition and manipulate the clay I was instructed to create a color test tile for each of my packages of clay. This allowed me to see the original color compared to the original color plus white before and after baking. Then I made a gray scale value sorter to make determining the absolute value of a color easier.

One of my favorite processes in the book has been making color palettes. This exercise involved tearing the color pages from magazines, sorting them into color groups and making collages to represent those colors. They are intended to be used as color guides for future projects.

Today's lesson is mixing pivot tiles. I think they will be an invaluable tool when trying to create a specific color. Each tile contains 12 variations of a single color by shifting the hue the value and the saturation.

Once the pivot tiles are completed I intend to use one of the color collages to inspire color selection for beads.