In my very first studio class, we had an assignment to make a tertiary color wheel (12 colors) out of found objects. It turned out to be much harder than expected – I remember riding around residential neighborhoods searching for flowers I could “borrow” for certain colors.
As it turns out, the entire studio had difficulties completing the assignment and many people just barely had time to glue their found items down before it was time to pin our color boards up on the wall for review. As these artfully arranged color wheels – made up of candy wrappers, flower petals, fruit peels, rusted metal washers, etc. – sat vertically on the wall, the objects began to break free and slowly slide down the boards. Our assignments didn’t look like color wheels anymore, they looked like gravity-challenged mounds loosely constructed out of garbage.
Reflecting on this experience over the years, the lesson I learned didn’t have anything to do with a tertiary color wheel, getting your work done expeditiously, or even that you shouldn’t trespass onto other people’s property and steal their flowers. No, the lesson I learned from this experience was to always use the right glue.