This
week I took advantage of my organized polymer clay stash so that we
could talk about mixing colors of clay. How many colors of clay do we
really need? If you are just starting out you probably won't have a
collection of 100 colors to pull from. You can however mix the colors
you do have to get a lot more colors. You just have to understand
what colors work well with each other and how to make them do what
you want them to do.
Have
you ever run into the situation where maybe you needed just a bit of
say purple clay and didn't have any? Probably what you did was to
pick a random package of blue clay and a random package of red clay
and combined some of each. Did you get the color you were expecting
or did you get something that was kind of muddy with a tinge of brown
to it? I go into why this might have happened in the video and once
you understand the why you can use this to your advantage.
Think
back to grade school when you forgot to wash out your paint brush
while painting with the set of watercolor paints that every teacher
required us to have. Did you ever forget to rinse out your brush and
end up with a muddy mess instead of a pretty picture? Usually by the
end of the year my watercolor paints were all different colors of
brown not the pretty colors I started out with. This happens with our
clay too, unless you happen to have a red that is a true red and not
a red that tends toward purple of orange and a blue that is a true
blue and not tending towards green or purple you could end up with a
dark muddy color. Now if both your blue and your red are tending
toward the same direction on the color wheel (purplish red/purplish
blue or greenish blue/orangish red) they will play well together too.
We
can also use the color wheel to our advantage in making our
collection of clay colors go further. If you need to tone down a
color add a tiny bit of color opposite of it on the color wheel and
you will take the edge off the color and mute it a bit. If you add a
color from next to it you can make it brighter (though a little
harder to predict the result) Just use tiny bits to add in, you can
add more but it is harder to take it away. Be especially careful
adding in red, it is a very strong color and tends to “take over”
the other colors.
I
do get asked on a regular basis what colors I recommend to buy if you
are just starting out making polymer clay foods. The first two colors
I recommend to buy are white and translucent along with a basic set
of chalk pastels, with this you can make so many foods. After that
start adding the basic primary and secondary colors. That said if a
color really calls to you and you love it (and can afford it) go
ahead buy it. If you love it you will find a way to use it. Just try
to make sure you have the basics too.
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