Month: November 2022

All About the Color Wheel- Lesson 2 in Color element of Art

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In this lesson, we will learn to make a Color wheel with Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary colors. We will also learn about the Complementary and analogous Color groups as they play an important role in deciding your art composition.

Let’s first start by understanding Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary colors. We will use three colors from our color pencil set to understand our terms-Red, Yellow, and Blue. First, to create a color wheel template we will divide a circle into 12 parts( 12 triangles).

Primary Colors- Primary colors are the most important in a painter’s palette because these are hues that cannot be created or derived by mixing other colors. The Primary colors in a color wheel are Red, Yellow, and Blue. If you have these three colors you can mix them in different amounts to create different colors.

Secondary Colors-Secondary Colors are colors that can be created by mixing equal amounts of two Primary colors. Red+Yellow=ORANGE, Yellow+Blue=GREEN, and Blue+Red=PURPLE are the three Secondary Colors on the Color wheel.

Tertiary Colors-Tertiary colors are created by mixing equal amounts of Primary color with a secondary color. Red+Orange=RED-ORANGE, Blue+Orange=BLUE-ORANGE, Blue+Green =BLUE-GREEN, Yellow+Green=YELLOW-GREEN, Yellow+Orange=YELLOW-ORANGE, and Red+Purple=RED-PURPLE are the six Tertiary colors.

Next, let’s talk about Complementary and Analogous colors.

Complementary colors are colors that are on opposite sides of the color wheel.

Analogous colors are a set of three colors that are next to each other on the color wheel usually a primary color and a secondary and tertiary color that sits right next to it.

Complementary color schemes create a highly contrasting composition, whereas analogous color scheme creates a composition with low contrast.

Color temperature is also another aspect where simply by looking at the colors we have a sense of warmth or cold. For example, when you look at the colors Red, Orange or Yellow you sense the hot sun, making these warm colors. Similarly, when you look at blue or green you might have a feeling of a cool sea breeze or cool grass which makes these Cool Colors. So when you have different hues, the hue which has more of the warm colors mixed will feel warmer and vice-versa. So a hue of violet or purple will feel more toward the warm spectrum if it has more red, whereas if it has more blue in it it will feel cooler.

Watch this video step-by-step to learn to make an easy color wheel using oil pastels

The colors being mixed with white, black, and grey also create different Hues, tints, shades, and saturation. To learn more about this, please refer to the previous post-https://nishasartforkids.com/2022/11/04/what-is-color-lesson-1-in-color-element-of-art/

Colored Pencil Techniques for Beginners(12 things to Draw): Lesson 2

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In this lesson, we will draw 12 things using Prismacolor colored pencils for beginners/kids. These are things that we would use a lot for our drawings, and these techniques will help us add form and texture to make our drawings look realistic.

The 12 things that we are going to learn to draw in this lesson are:

  1. Mountains/Hills
  2. Smoke
  3. Grass
  4. Wood/ Log
  5. Water in a lake
  6. Waterfall
  7. Rocks
  8. Circle to sphere
  9. Brick Wall
  10. Shadows/Reflections
  11. Feather Texture
  12. Fur Texture

We will use the techniques we learned in our previous lesson( https://nishasartforkids.com/2022/11/10/colored-pencils-techniques-for-beginners-lesson-1/)

to color along the form of the object, applying different amounts of pressure while coloring.

Please follow the link for the step-by-step video lesson to create each of these different objects:

Colored Pencils techniques for beginners: Lesson 1

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Colored pencils are a great medium for any beginner artist and they can create phenomenal results when used properly.

I have had a lot of parents showing frustration that when their kids use them, the colors do not seem to be bright and it is not easy for them to blend it together or even just color it smoothly without avoiding all the white spaces. The pigments in the colored pencils are generally held together using wax or oil. But usually, the colored pencils that are made for kids are made with hard wax, and hence it’s not so easy to lay down colors so easily. But at the same time, it is much easier to maintain compared to the Softcore wax-based more expensive oil pastels. The soft-core colored pencils do have the ability to blend better and it is easier to lay down the colors. But if not handled properly, it is much more brittle.

For blending and applying different techniques, the type of paper you use is also important. We do want the paper to have some tooth so that it can hold multiple layers of colors when blending but at the same time a paper that’s too rough is also not so good because that may leave a lot of gaps when you color and add details.

You can also use a colorless blending pencil to get a smooth blended effect on colored pencils. Wax or oil-based colored pencils could also be blended with baby oil while watercolor pencils can be blended using water( Read about watercolor pencils hereWatercolor Pencils for Little artists! ) But in this post, we will be discussing some basic beginner wax-based colored pencils. The color pencil I used here are Prismacolor Premier Soft Corepencilshttps://www.amazon.com/dp/B000C6RCD0/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_EsnEFbC3472KH

Colored Pencil Techniques

Colored pencils can give very different results based on the amount of pressure you apply. Coloring with light pressure will give a different effect compared to coloring with heavy pressure. So that’s what the first 3 techniques are:

  1. Light pressure- coloring with light pressure

2. Heavy Pressure- Coloring with heavy pressure

3. Gradate- Start with heavy pressure and lighten the pressure as you go forward

The next couple of techniques are when we layer or blend multiple colors to create different effects

4. Layering- Start with a dark color and layer on top with a lighter color

5. Burnish -Gradate+ Layering +blending with eraser. Use gradate technique, layer with colors, and blend it with an eraser or a colorless blender

6. Hatching

Colored with straight line strokes

7. Cross Hatching

Hatching in vertical and horizontal lines

8. Gradate+ Layering with Light Pressure

Use gradate technique and then blend in a lighter color with light pressure

9. Gradate+ Layering with Heavy Pressure

Use gradate technique and then blend in a lighter color with heavy pressure

10. Gradate with Tinting

Gradate and then layer with white

11. Gradate with Shading

Gradate with black and layer with another color

12. Gradate with Grey

Gradate and then layer with gray

To practice, and learn each of these techniques follow the link to my YouTube Video and color with me step-by-step:

What is Color? -Lesson 1 in Color element of art

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We see color when light waves are reflected from an object. When light falls on an object, the wave spectrum that is reflected back is the color of the object. Some objects are black because instead of reflecting it absorbs all the colors! Black is basically the absence of color. Similarly, an object is white when it reflects all the colors.

Colors can be described in 3 different ways: Hue, Saturation, and Value or intensity.

Hue- Hue is another name for a color. It is the dominant color, for example, you might see the names Prussian Blue, Cadmium Blue, and cobalt blue on your Blue paint tube but on all of these the key name or the color is BLUE or the hue is BLUE!

Saturation- The saturation of a color is determined by how bright or dull a color looks. It can be determined by the amount of grey in a color. A highly saturated color will have mostly white mixed whereas a low saturation will have a more grey mix.

Value or Intensity- Value is determined by the darkness or lightness of a color. When you add black to a color it creates a shade whereas adding white creates a Tint. Depending on the amount of black or white you add the color gets a lighter value or darker value.

We are going to do an exercise next where we will get a RED hue and then create different values and Saturation. We will be using acrylic paint for this.

The colors we will use are RED, GREY, BLACK, and WHITE.

The first thing we will create is a value chart of red. We will make seven squares. The middle square will be pure Red, and on the left, we will have different tints of red by adding different amounts of black( remember Black is a very strong color, so a tiny drop goes a long way).

Check out this step-by-step video to check out how to make the value scale:

Next, we will create a Saturation chart with 7 boxes. We will start by mixing grey and red together. As we move to the right side of our chart we will keep adding tiny amounts of white until it’s mostly a mix of red and white( making it highly saturated).

If you need help creating the saturation scale, watch the video and follow along: