This well loved colour wheel has travelled with me since uni. I always refer to it when painting.

I recently designed some tea towels for the Wood’s Ware brand and colour was the major talking point. How to achieve a colour match which was applied to ceramics, on a tea towel. It reminded of the ceramic colour trials I once photographed in the Wedgwood museum below:

The first design was of the back stamp of the ceramic brand Beryl. The colour applied to the Wood’s Ware ceramic made the brand Beryl so it was integral to be right. A large number of small swatches applied on cloth needed to be studied to identify the right match and Wood’s Ware organised test prints of the tea towels, that was needed to make sure the swatch was the correct one. The result below:

Visit Woods Ware here

This reminded me of when I had spend hours in the Liverpool John Moore’s library researching the original Josef Albers work, referencing colour relativity when I studied there. I guess it’s what motivated me to paint my largest painting in 2002! Called ‘A Negative’.

I was also lucky enough to visit the Josef Albers exhibition at Tate Modern in 2006 when I lived in London. This research continues to motivate me when it comes to the application of colour in my work.

After taking a break in painting in 2022 to raise my now 3 year old daughter, I’ve decided to revisit my fancination with colour to inspire the next body of work.

Taking all this into account it made me think about all the different ways of identifying colour or references it and inspired me to digitally sketch the below, that I call Colour Wheeling. The basis for my next painting….

Note:

Colour wheel • Monochrome • The Goethe Triangle • Subtraction of colour • Munsell Colour Tree • Ostwald Colour system • Faber Birren colour system • CMYK • RGB • Pantone Pigments • Hex • colour code • Swatches Colour palette • Semi-permanent • Fugitive colours • Permanent Colour • Interaction of colour • Near contrasting colours • Colour harmony • Colour gradient • Colour intensity Colour juxtaposition • Contract of colour • Color instrumentation • Colour temperature Saturation of colour • Colour systems • Colour theory • Colour intensity • Colour Intervals • Optical mixing • Colour mixing • Contrasting colours • Prism colours • Colour optics • Transparent colour • After image Optical illusion • Reflected colour • Warm and Cool • Dark and Light • Value • Chroma • Hue • Tone of colour • A chromatic scale of colors • Opacity • Albers Colour Relativity