Friday, April 22, 2011

Doing my homework

My recent pastel workshop reinforced the importance of knowing the value range ot the stick of pastel I am working with.  So I set myself the task of grouping my collection of pastels by colors, and temperature, then sorting them again by value.

A photo of some mid tone sienna color chips against the gray scale. 
It's easy to do with the dark and light ends of the spectrum, but mid values get a little trick.  I wound up making a color chip of each pastel stick, then visually ranking the color chips, then  photographing the chips against a set of known value gray scale sheets.

I used photoshop to remove the color saturation so I could view it in gray tones
 A week later I have a well sorted set of  700  pastel sticks arranged and labeled  by  brand, #, color, and value. And I have a set of color chips with the same information just in case I loose the label and need to figure out where a stick of color belongs.

This is only a portion of  my set.

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