I regularly teach creative dyeing of wearables to adults using synthetic dyes on silk. Until I started teaching, I naively imagined no-one could experience anxieties about working in colour. Using colour has always been instinctively easy for me: I experience it like tasting food when cooking. Colour is sometimes too sweet, sometimes too sharp; certain colour ingredients go well together while others 'taste' all wrong when combined. I can't articulate this in any formal way relating to colour wheels or the various charts and systems for arranging tones and hues. I'm lucky with this instinctive approach, but it doesn't help me explain how I make my choices to students. I needed to devise some programme of assisting those with little confidence in their colour sense, some of whom have not even mixed paints since primary school.
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