Adventure in Acrylics
Winter 2024 I took a Color Theory Class offered by the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts and taught by Joel Boyd. I was a bit intimidated by the plan to use acrylic paints for this class but decided to give it a try. We started with painting value scales and tones. Then experimented with monochromatic scales and combining complements. Mixing the colors in a damp paper palette kept them from drying out so quickly. Sometimes I mixed the colors with a palette knife and sometimes with my brushes. Creating our own color wheel and swatch grid helped prepare us for actual paintings. We discussed the differences between cool and warm colors, experimenting to see how they combined with each other. Next we did value and monochromatic paintings. It was interesting to see all the different colors that could be made from a single starting color. Using the lighter and darker shades gave the pictures a sense of dimension and depth. Our next experiments were with complementary and analogous color sche...