This task follows sections on colour theory and looks at how artists use colour as an element of their personal artist style. A few weeks ago an image came up in my email from Pinterest showing the colour palette of Mucha. This intrigued me, so when I started to research the way different practitioners use colour, I decided to try to make a colour wheel for some of them, using different primary colours to generate different secondary and tertiary colours. This idea came from a book I read awhile ago about modern colour theory (Wynne Conrad, 2021) in which the author, rather than using a traditional colour wheel, and mindful of artist prints, used yellow, cyan and magenta as the primaries for her colour wheel. Having explored that, she went on to create other colour wheels by tweaking the primaries, with the idea that each person could use a colour wheel in this way to create their own distinctive colour palette. I decided to make some different colour wheels to try to get at the colour palette of three artists who use colour in interesting ways.
The artists I chose were Alphonse Mucha, David Hockney and Victoria Crowe. Here are some screenshots of a selection of images for each of them. Rather than looking at individual images I wanted to run my eyes over multiple images to get a sense of their commonly used colour palettes. For reference, these are screenshots of the top few lines of images for the search term shown.
Having scanned selections of images for each artist, I went on to try to create their colour wheels. 
First I created the traditional palette of red, yellow and blue. This one, I felt, was closest to Victoria Crowe’s paintings, although the acrylics in my colour wheel can’t reproduce the glow of oils in Crowe’s work. She often uses a combination of blue with various tertiary colours. This approach of using one primary and a range of tertiaries was covered in the course materials.
This is cyan, process yellow and magenta, the colours used in most printers. This is the palette of Hockney’s iPad art, although my photo is underexposed, taken in artificial light, which makes it harder to recognise those crisp, bright hues. Of course Hockney works in RGB and his digital art can be viewed digitally without the intervention of a printer; however, I can’t paint a RGB colour wheel. While not accurate, strictly speaking, the CMYK colour wheel is the closest representation I can make of Hockney’s colour palette.
Creating a colour wheel fir Mucha was not so straightforward. He worked almost entirely with tertiary oil colours so I had to work backwards from the tertiaries to try to identify the primaries that had been combined to create them. I tried with the warm yellow, red and cyan. This worked relatively well but didn’t seem quite to produce the tertiaries I was looking for. 
I’ve been ill and by this time I was tired. While I still had the paints out I decided to use some of the excess paint to try using a tertiary in place of one of the primaries I was so exhausted that I couldn’t control the paintbrush so many of the colours run into one another. Regardless, it was interesting to see this colour range, and, while I wouldn’t choose to use it exclusively, it does create some interesting results. It would be interesting to continue this research to see how the colour wheels would vary if I painted the three wheels consisting of two primaries plus one secondary. I think using secondaries rather than tertiaries for the non-primary colours would result in less muddy hues.
The next day I returned to the task and decided to replicate part of the process but working with coloured pencils. I rarely paint, so I wanted to try to make the colours with a limited number of pencils in a way that I would be more likely to use. It immediately became apparent that this is a much slower process than painting, partly because it takes longer to fill the area, but mostly because secondary and tertiary colours must be layered one at a time. I tried again for the Mucha colour range by using red, yellow, cyan and black (whereas I used white paint for the lighter hues, when working with pencils white is usually ‘created’ by letting the paper show through. On coloured paper white pencils can be used to great effect.
Working in a more familiar medium. I could see that those primaries didn’t generate the Mucha palette. I therefore tried CMYK. This, again, is inaccurate because such colours wouldn’t have been available in the oils that Mucha used. I tried to compensate by choosing pencils which were a warm yellow, a cool red and my lightest warm blue.This seemed to get me closer to Mucha’s duck egg and warm browns. When I have time I would like to create lines of transition from the light hues to the dark ones, to see a fuller rage of tones that can be created with the limited palette.
While I didn’t entirely stuck to the instructions for this research task, I have learned a lot. I found the process of research by doing, as well as the more usual reading and looking at images, instructive. Carrying out this investigation into generating different colour ranges by using a limited palette helped me to get to know my art materials in new ways. While it was time consuming, the wheels I made with coloured pencils are beautiful in the way that the colours layer and remain, to some extent, distinct, rather than being a smooth mix of colours as with paint. While I love the sets of 72 pencils, to work with just four produces a very different style, and one which I would like to pursue further as I approach new drawings.
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