Day Ten: The Simplest of Things are Often the Hardest

Bodice in the making...

The task of creating  grayscale to an artist is familiar, but after my morning class with Paul this morning, I know that it is not easy. We were tasked with creating a 9-tone grayscale from scratch. With only black and white to start with, the first step was to find "middle gray" (the gray smack dab in the middle of black and white). Although this gray is sometimes referred to as a 50% gray, mixing equal parts of black and white would result in a paint too dark, because of black's strong tinting power compared to white. Finding middle gray was painstaking. Due to the large range of tones that mixing different amounts of black and white can make, there was a lot of room for error. After finding middle gray, we then found "quarter grays" in between middle gray and white and middle gray and black. Mixing, and testing swatches, and mixing again was very frustrating. In the end, my scale was a little to heavy handed, and my tones became very bunched up towards the black end of the scale. I never realized how hard creating a gray scale was. My final product did not turn out as well as I'd hoped, so I plan to do it over and improve.

In the afternoon, we continued to build our dresses. After completing the bust portion of the dress, my group and I decided to fold paper chains to create additional texture - like the paper chains used to make candy wrapper purses. Gabby worked on the skirt hoop portion of the dress. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but I'm so excited!