Playing with WC pencils -- rainbows and mixes

Kate said: Play with your pencils. So that's what I did. :)

First I looked carefully at the color charts and picked a warm and a cool of each color. (I chose two warms and cools of the reds.) Colors:
Cool yellow: Staedtler; Warm yellow: FC dark cadmium
Cool blue: D prussian; Warm blue: D helioblue-reddish
Cool red: FC alizarin crimson / D crimson lake; Warm red: FC deep red / D deep vermilion

The top row shows the colors opposite each other. I pulled color from each one into the middle. Can't say I found this effective, so I need to learn how to do this better.

Second row: I crosshatched each color with the other and then wet a part of each. B over Y; B over R; Y over R.
Third row: Same thing, only I changed the top and bottom colors.

I decided that I liked the green that I got in the left column, as well as the purple in column 2 and the orange in column 5, so I used those colors to make the color wheel. The blobs of orange, green, and purple at the outside of the circle are the mixtures.

Next step was to find pencils with that matched the 3 secondary colors, which I did. I used those colors on the inner part of the circle.

[What I've now ended up with are nine pencils (6 primaries, 3 secondaries) that I can grab and take with me on the road. I'll also add 3 or 4 neutrals and with this I should be set for trips, along with a sketchbook, paper towels, and waterbrush. I plan to continue experimenting with all the pencils at home, of course.]

I also experimented with tertiary colors, using the secondary pencil colors between each of the primary colors. I hope this makes sense.

Lastly, I became fascinated with the idea of rainbows so along the bottom of the paper I lightly sketched in six lines of each color, adding the next color to it after line 4, so that there was always overlap, then wet the bottom.

I had so much fun with this :) that I decided to try it out in a sketchbook with roughish paper and one with very smooth paper (70 lb) -- I really like that one! (I also cheated by finding a couple more greens to ease the transition between yellow and green... that was really bugging me.)