Module 4 Project

1. Discuss what you thought about creating the Value Scale and Color Wheel.

I had a very hard time (which is obvious in the finished products) creating both the value scale and the color wheel. I am, as the optometrist told me, 'color confused' meaning I'm not totally color blind but my color vision is pretty terrible. The black and the white in the value scale were easy, but trying to go from black to white in such small steps was hard for me. I bought the acrylics in the syllabus, phthalo blue, magenta, and yellow, and was not able to create a reasonable red or black with them. I tried  for about an hour to somehow make them darker using only the colors I had and it didn't work at all. I bought a more cyanish color from the art store (could not find one called cyan in any of the 8 brands they had stocked) but that ended up looking even worse. It was an interesting assignment but I think I failed in my attempts. My magenta was much brighter than the one in the video, which probably didn't help either.

2. Which media did you enjoy working with the best and why?

Working with the paint was much more viscerally satisfying to me. Putting the brush into the paint on the palette and onto the paper felt very nice. The charcoal, on the other hand, was very messy and hard to control.

3. What was the most important discovery in the creation of these studies?

Creating a true black from paint is very difficult though the act of painting is very fun and enjoyable. Charcoal is messy and very hard to work with and I have no idea how people are able to create such nice works of art with such varied levels of greyscale and nice lines, like Yvonne Jacquette's Three Mile Island, Night 1 (1982), using only charcoal.

4. What is the most important information you learned from watching the videos for this project? What is your opinion of the videos?

The value scale video was not helpful at all. He started with the black, started the next box, and was then finished. A better instruction set for that project probably would have made it a lot easier to accomplish. The color video was informative, but my attempts didn't really gel with what they showed in the video. I did enjoy how much shorter and to the point the videos were this week though!