Exercise 3.3 Watercolour studies

The aims of this exercise were to:

• explore and gain an understanding of opacities of colour through the observation and recording of transparent and semi-transparent objects

• extract colour palettes and proportions of colour from a self-selected first-hand visual source.

I initially tried a series of different still life set-ups, trying to work out what was the best combination of objects and the best way to arrange them.

For my first arrangement I settled on this grouping as I liked the different greens produced by the layers of transparent, textured and semi-transparent glass:

I was surprised by the intensity of some of the colours I could seen in the glass. In the first arrangement, the colour palette was quite harmonious. I found these greens quite pleasing.

I opted for white background and base layers for my arrangements as I wanted to be able to see the glass clearly against this 'pure' setting, although darker colours did come in at the side from surrounding objects.

Using watercolour paints I then attempted to match the colours and opacities of the colours I could see, producing these stripe designs:

I found it hard to match both the colour and opacity, and then to get the proportion of each colour right. I think the colours are fairly close, but the opacity and proportions could be more accurate. I was surprised by the variety of colours I could see and by how intense and unexpected some of the colours were, such as a pale violet, particularly when bouncing in from objects outside my created 'white space'.

The paper I used to try out my colours is included here as some of the colours are more intense and make up an interesting palette in themselves:

I then chose a different selection of objects, based on a different range of colours visible in the glass and tried to layer them from front to back to get the maximum number of colour combinations:

I observed the variations in colour between the objects and within each individual object, such as the browny-pink jug, which shows variation between the body of the jug, then handle and the base.

The colour stripes I produced from this arrangement were more contrasting: they ranged towards the extremes of turquoise blue and the red ochres. I tried to look at different cross-sections of the still lift to obtain a slightly different palette each time:

Here I tried a slightly different technique, trying to bleed the watercolours into each other to see what effect that would produce:

Again, my mixing page produced interesting results: