GPP Crusade No. 54: Mind Games -Inspired by the Iowa State Fair

I love the colors that surround me at the Iowa State Fair.  When Michelle Ward posted the August Challenge, Mind Games, I knew exactly where I would find my inspiration for the challenge.  This was a perfect chance for me to do a simple study of modern vs. traditional pigments.

Be sure to go to the GPP site to read what Michelle had to say about this challenge.

Have you ever tried mixing colors and just came up with muddy colors?  You learned in school that red + blue = violet, yellow + red = orange, and yellow + blue = green.  But it's not quite that simple.  If you mix the wrong versions of these primary colors, you will not end up with the pure colors you may have desired.
Try mixing only modern (organic) pigment colors together.  You will get pure, vibrant mixtures.
Traditional (inorganic) pigments work well together, but the mixtures will be more earthy.
Golden Artists Colors has a great reference sheet you can check out here and you can print it out for your reference. Follow this link for Golden's Organic vs. Inorganic Pigment list.

Back to the fair...

I chose the vegetable competition to provide inspiration for my Traditional (Inorganic) Color Palette (Cadmium Yellow Medium, Cadmium Red Medium and Cobalt Blue).
In addition to the primary triad, I used titanium white and ivory black.
In addition to the journal pages I've shown here, I painted entire pages with variations of the mixtures that I can use as the start of future journal entries.  I digitally extracted from those pages for the inspiration collage.

As much as I love daytime at the fair, the night holds my heart.  The midway and vendor lights are exciting against the evening sky.  Last year I discovered that the RetroCamera app on my phone takes the coolest shots at night, and I'm happy to share a few of those shots here along with my painted mixtures.

 The Modern (organic) Palette was created with Yellow Light Hansa, Phthalo Blue and Quinacridone Magenta.  Titanium white was used to create tints of the mixtures. It makes these transparent colors more opaque.  If I had wanted to retain more transparency, I would have mixed them with zinc white.

I hope you enjoyed this post.  Getting all this information compiled together was important to me and it's coming late.   Come back for the September challenge.  I'm hoping to be back on schedule. ;-)