
We're doing it!!!! We're getting into some of the technical art-y stuff!!! Are you excited?!!?!?!?
Ok. Well I'm excited enough for the both of us. Because if you've never taken an art class, you're about to learn something REALLY cool. And if you HAVE taken an art class... you're going to get to do some fun and clever color play.
To get started, we need to talk about one of the fundamental basics of color theory: the color wheel!
Before you get started on this assignment, take a peek at my post about color theory. Trust me, it'll help.
Did you read it?! GREAT!!! Because now we're speaking the same language.
Start by drawing SOMETHING. Hugely open-ended, I know, but you can really get away with just about anything to start. In my first iteration of this assignment, which you see above, I just took a pen and drew a bunch of swirly, scribbly, circly stuff. That's it. Random and satisfying. WHAT you draw doesn't matter as much as what you do with it in the coming steps. If it helps, there are all kinds of random idea generators you can google, like this one.
OOOOOOOOOK. So you've got your base drawing. Good. Now take a ruler or a straight edge of som kind, I used a magazine, and draw straight lines across the page to cut the page, and your drawing, up into sections. In the image above, you can see I've cut my big swirly mess into 4 sections. 4 is good. 6 is great. All the way, technically, up to 12. The more sections you create, the more complicated the next steps will be, so tread carefully. 4 felt good for me.
And now, the moment this has ALL been building to... take a look at your color wheel and pick a color to get you started. Then pick an analogous color to the one you've picked and use the two to color in one of the sections.
And repeat.
Until you've colored in all of the sections.
What's happening: This is an assignment that takes some planning and some thinking... but if you do all of your planning and thinking at the start, the rest of the assignment is a glorified paint-by-numbers (and highly satisfying). Play with color. Sketch and test and create theories and live into them. Trust your intuition. You know more about color than you think... This is an assignment that will help to take you to the next step in all this creativity and confidence stuff. And DO NOT let yourself give up if you make a mistake or mess up a color combo. Keep going. Make something ugly and learn from it. Make something beautiful and grow through it. Warm colors, cool colors, primary, tertiary, secondary, all of it. Learn something BIG that'll help you feel more and more like you belong here. Like you are someone who deserves to feel like they know what they're doing. Knowledge breeds confidence. Practice makes progress. So get to it.
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