Understanding Color: A Comprehensive Course for Artists

Explore how light forms color by examining electromagnetic waves, wavelength, and the visible spectrum, including seven colors and Newton's prism experiments.

Desaturate colors in low light and soften edges; cones detect red, green, blue while peripheral vision shows less color detail.

Explore how color is charted across light and pigment, from Newton's color wheel to rgb and cmyk systems, and navigate primaries, secondaries, and the 12-color wheel.

Observe color across hues to notice your mental and physical responses. Explore three ways to manipulate color—mixing, gray reduction, and lightening or darkening—and how chroma, value, and color temperature shift.

Explore color psychology and how color influences mood and perception in art, from red and blue to earth tones, with chromotherapy and historical insights.

Explore pigment color strategies from the color wheel, including monochromatic, complementary, and triad schemes. Learn to balance value, chroma, and the dominant color to create visually pleasing paintings.

Analyze how artists study color strategies by identifying dominant hues, mapping them on the color wheel, and applying complementary, analogous, and neutral palettes to convey mood.

Preview masterpieces, identify color strategies on a related worksheet, and discuss answers as you explore analogous, monochromatic, split complement, and other color schemes.

Examine how impressionists use pure color and optical mixing to convey light, and how color field painting leverages large color to evoke emotion, while color removal reshapes focus and composition.

Explore how painters build a painting palette, from base colors and limited to broad color sets, balancing continuity, mixing, and expressive color choices for landscapes, portraits, and more.

Discover how to build a painter’s palette, from starter sets to warm and cool primaries with earth tones, and use swatches to guide pigment choices for lightfastness and toxicity.

Explore color temperature through the color wheel, learning how warm and cool hues, undertones, and color leaning influence mixes and chroma in paints.

Explore how color mixing with pigments creates primaries, secondaries, and tertiaries, using glazing or surface mixing, while understanding color temperature, neutrals, and vibrant versus muted tones.

Explore color value by comparing light and dark tones on a gray scale. Learn how dilution, pigment strength, and medium affect value in watercolor, oil, and acrylic.

Learn to match colors using the color wheel, assess warm and cool undertones, and refine with tints, shades, and an on-location analogous palette activity.

Analyze how masters place color and shadows, study reflected light, and observe color strategies in florals, landscapes, and portraits to sharpen your own color decisions.

Practice color planning through eight color sketches using a color wheel, exploring monochromatic, complementary, triadic, tetradic, and analogous schemes, shadows, and color interactions.

Master shadows and value in monochrome and color studies by blending blue and black with a right-side light source. Use complementary and analogous schemes, saturation, and reflections to build depth.

End the course with an abstract landscape painted in oil using a palette knife, guided by a color strategy planning sheet and analogous color scheme of blues, greens, and neutrals.

Explore color as a vital tool for artists, from color perception and light and pigment models to selecting and mixing palettes for mood, using cool neutrals and white space.