Color 2: Chromatic Grays

This is my studio table with materials recommended by David Hornung to use in doing his exercises (David Hornung, “Color: A Workshop for Artists and Designers”–see an earlier post for more about the book). The palette and cups are from Hobby Lobby. They hold the eleven M. Graham gouache paints and cool dark and warm dark mixtures called for in the book. The brush is a 3/4-inch Daniel Smith synthetic. The color wheel is also from the book. The swatches are my attempts at mixing and painting out colors for the first exercise.

That exercise is to make several sheets of chromatic grays and then make a 5 x 5-inch design by cutting and pasting those colors onto a background. Chromatic grays are the muted colors on the third level in of the color wheel. I think the colors I've painted here have too much color, but that's the point of the exercise–to get a better idea of the different categories of colors. It's also not so easy to paint out flat, even swatches.