Happy International Color Day!

Today is a day for all you color lovers to celebrate! The International Colour Association has appointed March 21 as International Colour Day. Mark this special day by spending some time with color; play some color games, learn a bit about how we actually perceive color, or play around with some color harmonies.

As my favorite color theorist Johannes Itten said, “Color is life; for a world without color appears to us as dead.”

I absolutely love thinking and learning about color, and am thrilled for an official day each year to celebrate color! If you are a creative type who uses colors to make stuff or communicate ideas to your fellow tellurians, you could use the day to try experimenting a bit with color.

There's lots of ways to make quick color sketches, and there really isn't a right or wrong way to do it. Most artists I know (or admire from afar) incorporate regular color play into their practice in a way that fits best with their methods and medium. For example, my BQF (best quilting friend) Tricia has been creating mini color studies in fabric. Check out her work at Instagram, like this mini study of warm/cool colors, or this one that juxtaposes some color opposites. Or look at some of Drew Steinbrecher's work in fabric like this mini combining color complements, or these mini's that focus on minimal colors.

In past years I've created color studies and sketches in many different ways.

I've used solid colored fabrics to create color wheels, color harmony studies in patchwork blocks, and small scale color studies on cards.

Recently I've begun to use paper for color sketches. Above are color studies I made at the end of 2020, created within the constraints of a tangram. A fun exercise, but it was really time consuming. Then a few months ago I played with creating very quick color sketches in the form of a grid. Studying colors in a grid format is a tried-and-true method colorists and artists have been using for over 100 years, here's a few examples.

Michel Eugene Chevreul was a French color theorist and scientist who wrote extensively about optical color mixtures and the modification colors undergo when juxtaposed with other colors. His book The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors and Their Applications to the Arts first published in 1839 and shortly afterwards published in many other languages. He used grids to help study these effects with yarn, and used other color study illustrations to prove his theories to others.

Emily Noyes Vanderpoel was an American color theorist, artist, author, and philanthropist who studied the issues and limitations human color perception for working artists. She used grids as a way to study color harmony in many forms, and as a way to analyze color in other artists works. Her book Color Problems, A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color was originally published in 1901, and was recently republished in 2018.

Most significant to me are the teachings of Johannes Itten, the Swiss painter, teacher, and author. Itten was part of the core staff at the Weimer Bauhaus, where Josef Albers enrolled in Itten's preliminary course. You can clearly see the influence that Itten's teachings and ideas about color had on Alber's as a color theorist and teacher. Itten used grids as above to help illustrate color ideas, interactions, and theories to students.

I think creating grids with colors can help you boil down color relationships to their essence. It can reveal color effects without distractions from other elements (such as lines, frames, or subjects in a picture).

Plus making a simple grid is pretty quick!

Why not give making some quick color sketches a try? You certainly don't have to do it they way I do! If you're a maker, chances are you've got lots of material on hand - enough to use a little to play with color. All you need is a little time and imagination.

If you want some ideas on how to to get started, I'll be sharing three ways to create simple color studies this week. You can use these ideas to create color studies in a way that works best for you, but I'll also be showing you step-by-step how I use colored paper to create simple grid studies. Keep an eye out here this week for more posts about color in celebration of International Colour Day!

This post is one in a series about making color sketches.

This is the introduction post.

Find How to Create a Color Study With Color Harmony here.

Find How to Create a Color Study Investigation here.

Find How to Create a Color Study With Representational Colors here.