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It is my greatest desire that you become better acquainted with color through color observation.
Please remember that no one person sees color exactly the same. If you carry the principles of
temperature, relative experience, and correct values, you can bend, distort, and tailor a whole world
of color to your vision. We are thankful that the Impressionist movement brought forth a new way
of seeing color as light. However, at the time, many objected its ideas.
It is my opinion that having confidence in your color choices makes for a greater painting experi-
ence. This confidence is not gained through book learning and theory alone, but through a combi-
nation of practice and knowledge. I love to look around the class room at the variety of subtle color
expressions that each student has painted. Some don't care for a particular color, so they shift that
color note one over on the color scale. Some really push more color into their pieces, while others
mute their colors. It is all beautiful when it is purposefully composed.
Through disciplined practice, we hope to make color work for us, instead of more work for us.

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Here are a few bonus selections to either paint from, or take inspiration from.

#1- Palette knife paper studies. Take some pieces of colorful paper and fold them into simple
shapes. Arrange the shapes so they influence the other pieces, the ground plane, and the background.
Using a palette knife, paint the color notes, paying attention to how each color interacts with one another.
In these two examples, simply rotating the papers creates new color notes.

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#2- Light gradation study of peaches- Take several similar objects and arrange them in a line-up.
Placing your light source to one side of the objects, note how the light warms or cools as the objects move
away from it. In this example, the light was a cool/neutral bulb, placed to the right of the peaches. Note
how the peach at the farthest left is darker in value, has a warmer shadow, and that the cloth is darker on
the left side as well.

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#3- Another white on white challenge- Here is a scene of shells. These may be more chal-
lenging than the eggs and canister scene as there are few dark values in the scene, and the light
source is more cool/neutral. Observe the warmth in shadows below the shells, and the subtle
variations in color of each shell.

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Bonus Section-
The following section contains high resolution photos of all the demonstrations and set-ups

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