One of the areas that I know I need to work on is colour, so when I saw a Colour IQ test in Katherine Tyrrell’s weekly roundup 7th September 2008 – Who’s made a mark this week? I had to try it. The challenge is to sort the colours in the four bands shown into hue order. It’s harder than it looks, because the differences are so slight in most cases!
So how did I do? My answer is shown at left, and I got an 8 (0 is perfect). Better than I expected, since I’ve always felt that I struggle with colour. And interestingly, the mistakes I made were not in the green area, which I’ve always felt was the most difficult for me to see differences in, but in the blue and red areas. Perhaps this is a result of those areas being toward the end of the test, and I was tiring and/or rushing?
In any case, this test says that I am not too bad at comparing one colour to another. But I still have trouble “seeing” a colour on its own, without that comparison. So the next question for me is, how do I improve at learning to see – and mix – colours in isolation, or surrounded by non-similar colours? That will be one of my challenges this fall.
I’m glad you enjoyed the test. It occurred to me that it was one of those tests that would make a really good ‘limbering up session’ for the eyes before painting.
What I found was it was really easy to see the differences if you focused entirely on comparison to the adjacent colour only – which for me implies there’s a lot to be said for holding a brush with a new colour on up next to a which is already there before putting it on the painting