Class Members Week 2 Spring 2025
SPRING Term week 2
Date: 21st and 22nd January
Tutor: Siân am, and Siân and Rob pm
Harbour House : Art Studio
Tutor Led
what to bring
Please bring plenty of watercolour paper with you this week. It does not need to be stretched. You will need a few pieces that are at a good size ( about as you as big as you normally work for a painting). It is always better to use the paper you normally paint on, but this will also be an opportunity to use up some of the less useful papers you may have acquired ( e.g. Langton). You will need a palette for mixing, and of course your paints and a few brushes :) A sketchpad for notes may also be useful for note taking (but not for the painting exercises).
THIS Week:
This week we will be beginning the theme of Colour by looking at ways of mixing paints, and addressing some of the issues that have been brought up in class, and some that we have noticed ourselves.
You might find it useful to download and print the following file before coming to class :
Know Your Paints (pdf) Know Your Paints (Word). Know Your Paints (Pages)
Siân has addd two pages for her book describing her method of mixing colour which you can view HERE.
Jackson’s Art has an excellent book ‘A Guide to Paper’, available online here
colour of the Week
The Munsell colour system
So, this week, all the colours!
We will be reviewing the basic colour wheel as part of this week’s Tutor Led session.
If you would like to take colour theory further you might like to take a look at the Munsell colour system, which relates hue, tone (value) and chroma. It is a tad more complicated (!), but informative and enlightening.
LINKS: Munsell.com , or for a slightly lighter read, Munsell on Wikipedia
‘homework’ challenge
Don’t stop at what we did in class! Admit to yourself how well you know the paints you own. Spend some time ‘playing’ with them again, either to learn about individual paints in terms of their granulation, transparency, lightfastness, staining properties, or to experiment with how they mix with other colours.
This is not time, nor paper, wasted!
Quote of the week
“Colours are forces, radiate energies, that affect us positively or negatively, whether we are aware of it or not.”
Johannes Ittens
ArTIST of the week
BOOK ‘The Elements of Colour’ is based on his book “The Art of Colour’
Johannes Ittens
Johannes Ittens (1888-1967) was a Swiss expressionist painter, designer, teacher, writer and theorist associated with the Bauhaus school.
He taught at the Bauhaus from 1919 to 1922 developing a course to teach students the basics of art, including composition and colour. He theorised seven types of colour contrast, including hue, tone, temperature, complements, simltaneous contrast, contrast by saturation and contrasts by extension. Please don’t ask too many questions about the last three! We too are still learning.
He was likely to have been influence by Munsell, who first started work on his system in 1898 and published it in full form in A Color Notation in 1905.
CLASS NOTICEBOARD : Any new items to be added? please email details and they will be added by the following class.