In the seminar, one of the things we talked about was the primary and secondary nature of a color. Think about the color wheel, and how each color is situated in-between two other colors.
Take red, for example. On one side, it's flanked by violet, and on the other side, orange. The primary characteristic refers to the major family a color resides in, or its dominant trait. The secondary characteristic refers to the undertone, or the adjacent hue it's closest to. Red's secondary characteristic could be orange, making it an orangy-red, or violet, making it a violet-red. Colors can also have a secondary characteristic of a color near it. For instance, you can have a bluish-red, too.But the Traditional artist's color wheel doesn't do an adequate job of explaining this concept, so we were introduced to the Natural Color System, another way of organizing colors.
It diagrams the progression from one color into the next, and charts colors that fall on paths in between each color. My photograph doesn't capture the nuances of each color, but at least it gives you an idea of the structure.We also pulled out our paints to try our hand at mixing colors to create colors with clear secondary characteristics.
The first series you see across the longest row uses a yellow with a distinctly green undertone, mixed with each of the other colors. Really interesting exercise you can do at home to test this theory. For instance, not all reds and yellows will make a pure orange. If you want to know the colors we used, email me for the details.