Who is this: Little Color Wheel

I keep a little tiny very simple color wheel on my palette just to help me remember.

In this painting I always find myself wanting to take some of the colors closer to gray or staying far away from it. Or in some cases more warm (red/yellow) or more cool (blue). To help with this I keep a little color wheel on my palette. It’s a little 1 inch square peace of mat-board with small painted circles on it. The color wheel itself is very simple, it has to be because of its size, just the primaries (red, yellow, blue), the secondaries (orange, purple, green) plus white and brown.

That is it, it’s all I need to quickly remind myself if I need to move a paint mixture more towards gray, or change its temperature. For example if I have a mixture that is too yellow, I glance at the color wheel and see what color is opposite from yellow and add that to the mixture, in this case it is purple. It’s not super advanced, it doesn’t cost any money and it’s super easy to make.

For today’s session I worked more on the little still life part of this painting. I’m trying to paint the foreground without making it too distracting from the figure.