I’ve been using kato clay, a brand specifically encouraging colour mixing with 8 “spectral” colours and a detailed colour mixing page (http://katopolyclay.com/index.php/tips-techniques/color-mixing/mixing-chart). But that only circles the colour chart. I love the colours in between as well.
With my first packs I made colour chips of blends with white and black for each colour. It took a little longer, but I now have a set of samples for every pair of colours. For each pair three strips – 100% colour, adding in half as much white, and adding in the same amount of white.
If I want green, I could start with the clay labelled green
or the olive green hidden between yellow and black
or yellow mixed with greens or blues
or I can start being a bit more adventurous. In fact the “green” clay turns out to be a very exciting mixer.
Green and magenta looks pretty. For each of the light strips I have the same colour pairs with 50% and zero white.
They are a great head-start when trying for a particular colour.
The “Skinner method” (named after the woman who developed and shared it) is a core polymer clay technique. As well as making the colour reference chips I used some of my results when attempting some kaleidoscope cane building.
These are enormous fun, created in a very free and exploratory way. Each set shown above uses just a pair of colours plus white. These are based on videos from Fiona Abel-Smith and Teresa Pandora Salgado.
On an aside, the power of the reflection/mirroring of the kaleidoscope and the pattern-finding of the human eye is amazing. I gave my husband a little clay demo, talking and fairly randomly grabbing scraps on the worktable. The end result:
Yellow and violet were used in a tutorial from Alice Stroppel
Actually that colour mix was a blast from the past – some silk thread dyeing ten years ago (27-Jan-2011 and on, concluding with final gamp shawl 20-Feb-2011)
A lot of the experiments remain in cane form, with just a few slices taken to make the kaleidoscopes, however I did have some fun combining an earlier Alice Stroppel experiment with some basketry techniques. The central clay medallion was baked with wires already in place.
OK, full disclosure – some earrings appeared too.
Leftover clay from pair mixing blends was used to make a cover for my latest research notes.
The research is around poignant / evocative and objects / things / stuff / sculpture… so I found it amusing to make the folder/holder of readings and notes into an object in its own right. (obvious future making note is to consider shrinkage).
Back to colour exploration, I should have mentioned making a series of chips showing values from white to black.
For that I somewhat laboriously cut out multiple squares.
In most mixing I’ve used the cutter while developing a colour, but when replicating in bulk a mix that was 1 part Turquoise, 32 parts Orange, 48 parts White and 16 parts Yellow I baulked. Happily the graph paper under my glass allows for more efficient cutting of sheets of clay. A 4 x 12 cm rectangle of white takes a matter of moments to cut.
That mix recipe neatly segues to my title topic. The beautiful space between orange and turquoise. It’s dawn or sunset, not mud.
A raw patchwork clump
became a beautiful little dish, about 7 cm across.
There are plans and experiments for making it into some other things,
possibly in combination with a cane made of leftovers, based on Alice Stroppel’s signature method
But I got distracted by a Clay Zoo tutorial (making a tree leaf necklace) using colours in this space, but with some very clever techniques along the way. One is the use of 3 colours in the blending, which has the effect of emphasising the turquoise end and reducing the oranges. The second is creating a leaf cane with colours changing down through it, meaning thick slices cut give leaves of different colours in the final cane.
This meant I needed to revisit my blend samples to get more precise mix ratios for my start colours.
The numbers are drawn into the clay before baking, and index to my colour mixing note recipe book. Across the top is a controlled set of mixing steps, at the bottom, the colours I eventually used.
Yesterday’s end-of-day results
Fibres of Being 
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