Fun With Barbara McGuire: Color Wheel

color wheel before baking

.....and a tip of the hat to Maggie Maggio who created and shared this color mixing technique.

I'd seen Maggie's videos about mixing colors on her blog, but it wasn't until I got the "Images On Clay II" by Barbara McGuire that spurred me into action to create a color wheel of beads. Maggie demonstrates using clay colors that are close to being true primaries: Premo Zinc Yellow, Cobalt Blue, and Fuchsia.

Barbara used Metallic Copper, Metallic Gold, and Pearl Blue, and the results are more earthy tones. I love that! I did a similar thing, but added some red to the copper and added some yellow to the gold to make them slightly closer (and brighter) to standard primaries while retaining the earthiness.

"Images On Clay II" is about image transfer on polymer clay, but this color mixing segment is included in the book and I highly recommend that any polymer artist who hasn't done this exercise to make a bead color wheel immediately! The link to the book is in my amazon.com list on the right. I love the secondary colors created by mixing the primaries, and plan to do more experimenting very soon.

color wheel in progress