Color Wheels in Watercolor Paint

My favorite art to make lately has been painting color wheels with watercolor paint.  This probably my favorite one so far. It is a color study of five pigments.

Sometimes I include color wheels into larger compositions.

Sometimes I paint little color wheels to test out colors or an idea for future reference. I made this color wheel to test out a very red heavy color wheel.  It uses both black and red ink. 

 

I used that color wheel to paint this piece.

I'm making myself a little book of color swatches, including a few color wheel, such as this one.  

I used that one to help me paint this piece.

Some of my color wheels use a combination of traditional watercolor paint and mica paint, which looks metallic and flashes in the light. See the rainbow flash?

This color uses two reds, two yellows, and two blues, mixed in pairs.

Same with this one. Plus a cat.

This color wheel also uses two yellows, two reds, and two blue, plus I used colored pencil on top to add the shading.

Thanks for looking at my color wheels. If you would like to purchase one of my original paintings, with or without color wheels, have a look in my Etsy shop, gwenbeads, under the section on 2D art. 

 

Doodle No. 37 Three Cats of Dr. Caligari

Never be afraid to go full rainbow. 

Prismacolor black ink, Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils, Finetec and other mica watercolor paint on Stonehenge 250 GSM 100% cotton paper

4”square

See the flash of the mica.

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Doodle No. 36 Calling Sector 7

This doodle has more mica paint than the others. 

5” square

I thought you might like to see how I layered the colors. The finished piece is bottom right. 

Drawn with archival Prismacolor black ink, Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils, Finetec and other mica watercolor paint on Arches 300 GSM 100% cotton paper. 

Original available: https://www.etsy.com/listing/708956750/

Thanks for looking. 

Doodle No. 35 Rooftop Conversation

Remember Cat Planet? This is different planet that also has cats. Sure, you can only see one cat here, but there are more cats on the dark side of the planet. The scale in the right should give you a sense of how big everything is. 

I did something different with the colors on this one. I had a cognitive shift in how layering colors works. I layered colors on the opposite sides of the color wheel, and I’m telling you, it was pretty dicey there for a while because when you mix pink and green, you get brown. Half way through the coloring, I thought it was almost certainly past the point of no return, a total color failure,  At that moment, I took my Kepler dog for a walk to get away from it for a while. When I returned to this drawing, I decided it was salvageable. In the end, I got it right where I hoped it would be when I decided that mixing pink and green was a good idea. 

5” square. 

Drawn with archival Prismacolor black ink, Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils, Finetec and other mica watercolor paint on Aquarelle Arches hot-pressed 100% cotton 140 lb paper. 

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Doodle No. 34 In one hole and out the other

This shows another version of the Poincaré model of hyperbolic space with microbes, space junk, aliens, and a few plants. 

Some are real. 

Some imagined. 

Some are totally unbelievable. 

I’ve worked in these colors before. 

I suspect I’ll use them again because they match the furniture. 

5.75” diameter circle.

Drawn with archival Prismacolor black ink, Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils, mica watercolor paint on Stonehenge 250 GSM 100% cotton paper. 

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