Color Collector: Explore the Art of Color Mixing With Gouache

1. Introduction: This class is called color collector, explore the art of color mixing with gouache, but acrylic if you want to. Why is the presentation always so hard. All I have to say is hello. Hello. I'm Marie-Noelle. I'm an artist and illustrator. Today I want to share with you my deep love of color so that you can find what it is that you enjoy about this aspect of painting. Color, what can I say about it? There's so much. I don't think that I would be painting today if I didn't have a deep love of color. My guess is that's the same for you because if you didn't have a deep love for color, then you probably would just be drawing in black and white all the time. Unless, you're scared of color and just haven't made the switch because you're not quite sure how to go about it, which is totally normal. If that's the case, then you're also very welcome to join this class. This class is really meant to complexify your use of color and get a hands-on training with your colors so that you can hone in on the colors that you're specifically looking for while you're painting. We're going to be working with a basic palette, so black, white, and your three primary colors: red, yellow, blue. I'm going to be demoing it with gouache because I love gouache and I know a lot of people love gouache. But if you have acrylic, then that's also a great alternative. That's actually what I learned with initially. Maybe leave your watercolor to the side for now, even though all the principles that you're going to be learning can be applied to watercolor. The class is going to be built in two parts. The first part is going to be an in-depth, deep dive into color mixing and color swatches, and color gradations, and color wheels. That might sound a little overwhelming, but I guarantee that if you sink into the idea of the exploration of color and falling in love with color more and more, then you will enjoy it. This section can be quite short and it can be quite long depending on how much deep diving you want to be doing. We're also going to be talking about complementary neutrals which I love and skin tones before moving onto the second part of our class. The second part of our class is going to be an application of all the things that you learned in the first part. We're going to be doing color explorations and creative color collecting which I know it sounds fun to me. I'm going to have a range of different creative exercises, but it's not really about creating finished pieces, it's really about collecting colors and having a color diary where we can explore and have fun with different combinations of colors and see what they do for us. I can't wait to get started because color is one of my favorite subjects, and it's infinite. It's almost scary how infinite it is. But don't worry, we're going to break it down into easily digestible parts so that you can be more confident in your color mixing and find the colors that work for the art you want to create. Let's get started. 2. Tools for the Class: Let's talk about the tools that you're going to need for the class. Obviously, you're going to want a range of paints and specifically primary colors, black and white. The reason that we're not going to be working with any of the other paints in my palette, which are, green or purple, is because I really want us to explore the range of different colors that we can create from scratch. That's really important and it's super fun. If you only have one set of primaries, that is, red, yellow, blue, then that's fine. If you have different types of reds, different types of yellows, and different types of blues, then that's awesome, and it'll be super fun to play around with those as well. I'm just going to show you a few of the primaries that I have. So paint that I'm going to be using for this class is acrylic wash by Holbein, but I know that there is a ton of other paint that exist. This is by no means a necessity. Do not need to get this specific brand of paint, and if you want to be doing this class with acrylic rather than gouache that's fine, and even if you want to do with watercolor, that's fine as well, though I do need you to be aware that watercolor can be a little bit more tricky for color theory because you also need to be managing the water-paint ratio. If you have the choice, then try to go for something where you can just use the paint pure out of the tube such as gouache or acrylic paint. For this class, all you need is three primaries, and black and white, and those are the five colors that you need for the class. I have one set of primaries, which is yellow, magenta, and cyan, which are pretty close to the ideal primary set. Then again, I say that and I also disagree with myself because it's not that there's one ideal primary set and one non-ideal primary set. Simply, what I mean by that is that with these three colors of primary yellow, primary magenta, and primary cyan, you're going to get the biggest range of colors. You're going to be able to get all the nice oranges, all the nice greens and all the nice purples. You're also going to want some water, some palates. I have a few of them here. A sketchbook or pieces of paper in which you're going to be doing all your color collecting and color mixing. I have this notebook that actually the pages aren't that thick and they're maybe not even that adapted for paint, but it doesn't really matter to me, and I just thought it would be fun to have it all in one little book, but you can do whatever works the best for you. You're also going to want a pencil that can be really useful, and paint brushes, of course. I'm going to be using more of a flat brush, so I can be working with different swatches, but for the color experiments, you can of course have a range of different brushes, including round ones, small ones, big ones, whatever works best for you. Al right, let's get started. 3. PART 1 — Color Swatch Collecting — Collecting Grays: For this first exercise, we're going to actually put to the side the colors and just work with our black and our white tubes of paint. I guess you might be wondering why is this important. Obviously, white and black, what does that create together? Gray. Gray is one of these colors that is often underrated and not considered beautiful. But the variation from white to black through gray can create immense beauty, and that's already very clear even if you look at art history and at the amazing paintings or drawings that have been created by other artists. Black, white, gray, they're the basis, the root of all the variations in color, because value is actually one of the most important things when you're creating artwork and gaining a good grasp on your value structures can be extremely useful to create wonderful paintings. In doing this exercise, we're also trying to gain more mastery in our appreciation for value and tone. As Roma Tearne says, "Grey has no agenda. Grey has the ability that no other color has, to make the invisible visible." Since we really want to become familiar with how much paint we need to use in order to get the exact shade of gray that we want, we're going to be creating a color swatch that ranges from the pure white to the pure black, and everything in between. It might sound a little tedious at first, but if you really sink into it, then I hope you'll find that you'll enjoy it. I know that when I set out to do my first color mixing class I was like, "Oh, I don't know if I'm going to have the patience for this." But if you really take it as an experience of learning how to become familiar with the tools that you want to be using, so that when you're actually painting, you don't have to worry about having to figure out what color it is, and how do I make this color that I can see in my mind. Well, then I think you'll find that it's a very enriching experience. Just let's sink into the color that we create and have fun with it. For this first step, we're going to take our notebook or our stack pages. Since my book is actually, as you can see, a little smaller, it's more of an A5 size. For the purpose of this exercise, I'm actually going to turn it so that it's horizontal rather than vertical. If you're using something that is more to an A4 or letter size, then that's fine. You can just keep it vertical. The thing is I just want to have enough space on the page here for the color swatches that we're going to be doing. What we want to do here is create two parallel lines. The reason for this is because we are going to be creating little squares all connected to each other in order to make our color swatches. We're going to be making 10 of them. I'm doing these by hand, but if you want to make something super precise with a ruler, you can. But I wouldn't say it's the most important. What's more important is what we're going to be doing with these. For the first exercise, we're going to be taking our two primary white and primary black or whatever white or black that you have in your paint set. We're going to be putting the lighter color on the left and the black on the right. You can see I also have water here and I'll show you why I need that. But I want one thing to be very clear. In order to do this exercise, it's actually really important that your brush doesn't have too much water on it. Why? Because the more you use water, the more you're going to be diluting your paint, so you won't be getting the actual hue that you're seeing because you're going to be making it more transparent. As you saw, I put a little bit of this white directly on here and that's fine. I'm just going to take the excess and then put it on my palette. I just want to make sure that I have a good surface here. I want to try to get rid of any of the little bumps. You're actually going to notice I'm not really going to respect the upper and lower lines of these squares and that is perfectly fine. Now I'm going to perfectly clean my brush. Why? Because I'm going to be applying the black and I want it to be the purest black possible. I want to make sure I have no white on that. Most important thing, I want to dry it thoroughly. I can even squeeze the brush to try to get out any excess water. It feels nice and dry, and I can go in and put in my pure black. The reason I start with the pure white and pure black is so you can really get a sense of where you're going. You really have these anchor points for the purest forms of these colors. Yet again, washing my brush and this time it's even more important than that last time to make sure that I have absolutely no pigment on my brush. The reason is going to be very clear, and it's because of one of the properties of color that we're going to be observing and experimenting with. Of course I'm going to tell this to you. But I feel like the way that you understand this most is by doing it yourself. Please don't underestimate the importance of actually doing this in order to understand what's going on with the color. Basically, the reason I want to make sure that I have absolutely no paint on my brush is because dark colors tint light colors very rapidly. What that means is the tiniest little dot of color is going to affect your white. Since white is the lightest color that you're going to be finding. It is of the utmost importance that when you're working with white and you're looking for a specific shade, that you make sure you don't have any drops of any other pigments on your brush. Another thing I want you to note here is that this first part is going to be the one that is the most difficult. If you have to do this a few times in order to get it right, that's perfectly normal. It is quite tricky. First I'm going to take the tiniest little dot of black paint. I'm not even sure if you can see the amount of paint that I have on here, but it's really not very much. I'm almost afraid that it's too much, so I'm going to take a little bit off and then I'll add if necessary because it's much harder to go lighter and it's much easier to go too dark quickly. I'm going to mix it in with a fair amount of this paint. You can see that tiny amount that I'm mixing in with this huge amount of white. This is also something that's important when you're doing these color mixes is that you mix really well so that you have a homogeneous amount of color. I'm not sure if you can see it on the video, but you will notice on your page that it's already darker. I'm going to continue this. I'm going to add a tiny bit of this black and maybe I'll take these ones and add it into my white. You want to be careful here because you would be surprised how quickly it can shift so proceed with caution. The more that you practice this, the easier it's going to get to recognize whether you're at the right color. In the beginning, it can be a little tough to see how close or how far away each one of these shades are. It takes a little bit more time to recognize that. The more you move forward with this, the more you're going to realize that you need to add more paint, more black paint in order to darken your color. The reason for that is because since darker colors make lighter colors change very quickly, or since your light colors becoming darker, it needs a little bit more of the darkness in order to become darker. If that makes sense, I think that was maybe convoluted way of explaining it, but you will see what I mean as you move forward with this exercise. You see how I added in a good amount there, but then it looks pretty similar to the color I just made. This is that rule in action. The fact that the more you move forward towards darkness, the more darkness you need to add to your color. For this phase, I like to really go at it easy. Doesn't matter if it takes you a few retakes. With all these exercises, the more that you do them, the more familiar you're going to be with how your paint reacts and how much paint you need to add in order to make your color exactly the hue that you want it to be. I'm getting thin here on the amount of paints on bringing in little bit more white, which means I'm going to have to come in with more black in order to get it to the shape that I want. If you make a mistake on one or two of them where you have two shades look a little bit similar. Either you can redo it or if you don't want to, that's fine. Just move on and try to pay attention to that next time you make an increment. 4. Color values: A color's value is the lightness or darkness of a color. One way that you can help identify the value of a color is by squinting when you're looking at that color. When you squint, the colors fade away and the old become slightly gray. It might take a little bit of time in the beginning to really hone in on how to do this, but once you do, then you'll be able to very quickly recognize how light or dark color actually is. Just to give you an example, if I told you to think of a yellow and of a blue, your yellow is obviously going to be much lighter than a blue. Then sometimes you'd be surprised because colors like red, maybe it's a little bit more difficult for you to determine what value it is. But if you squint, then you'll see maybe it's more of a mid-range gray. 5. Collecting Tints & Shades: Now that we've gotten a little bit more familiar with our white-to-black range, we're going to move on to our colors. We're going to include them back in. Let's do a recap of a few of these definitions. A hue is another name for a color, like red or green or orange or blue. Those are all hues. A tint is a hue plus white. A shade is a hue plus black. I'm going to ask you to choose one of your primary colors and it can be any one. It can be your red, your yellow, your blue, whichever one you want to start out with. We're going to mix it with white. We're going to be exploring this range again, just like we did for the white-to-black, except this time we're going to do it with our specific colors so that we can complexify our use of color and get a sense of how much paint you actually need in order to tint your color just the slightest. I also want to make clear, like I was explaining during the demo, when we're mixing a very light color with a very dark color, it means that it has to travel a lot from this light to get to the dark color. When that's the case, when you're using a lighter color with a darker color, then go ahead and use a 10-box swatch so you can really get a sense of the range that exists. For colors where there's a little bit less of a difference in light and dark between the two colors that you're exploring, then you can go for something smaller. I'm going to ask you to do a six-box swatch. Here is the guide for our exercise in collecting all the tints and shades of our primary colors. We're going to just focus first on collecting one of the tints of one of our primary colors. Pick whichever one you want, remember the number of boxes that you need and that's what we're going to start out with. You can also copy simply the order in which I did things in the demo. You don't have to refer back to this guide if you'd prefer not to. Let's get started and collect the tints and shades of our reds. Make sure you put your lightest color on the left. In my set of colors that I have, I have multiple reds, multiple yellows and multiple blues. For the sake of this class, I'm actually going to be creating every single swatch for each one of these colors. You don't need to do that. However, know that if you do, and if you do have different types of yellow, red, and blue, then it's going to help you practice becoming familiar with your colors. It's also fun to see the differences that are created with each one of these primaries. If you only have one tube of red, one tube of yellow, one tube of blue, no worries, that's fine, please go ahead and do that. Now that we've done our explorations with white plus color, I want us to do explorations with black plus color. Since black is obviously the darkest color that exists, I'm going to ask you to keep that on the right side of your color swatch and put your colors on the left side just to maintain consistency in your explorations. The color I chose first was the reds. The way that I decided to do this was to have all my reds plus white on one page and then move on directly to red plus black on the second page so that I have the entire range of tints and shades for that specific color. Now let's move on to collecting the tints and shades of our yellows. Finally, let's collect the tints and shades of our blues. Also, please feel free to share in the project section so that you can inspire others with the work that you've done and share the discoveries that you've made. 6. Introducing the Color Wheel: Now that we've explored a range of different hues with black and white and we're getting more familiar with how we can add a little bit of complexity to those colors that we're using. We're going to move on to the color wheel. This is a super, important, and fascinating subject. Obviously, when you're thinking of a color wheel, people's idea of primary colors is red, yellow, blue. While that is correct, it's actually a lot more complex. In particular, the set of primaries that you start out with will make a huge difference in your gamut of colors that you're able to create. Another way of putting that is that using different primary colors is going to create entirely different color wheels. They're warm and cool reds, warm and cool yellows, warm and cool blues, and each one of those primaries is going to help you create an entirely different color wheel. Whether it's magenta, yellow, and cyan, or let's say a scarlet red, an ultramarine blue, and a lemon yellow. Use whatever primary colors you have. We are going to be creating an in-depth color wheel, so that you can really get a sense of these ranges, and rather than stay with the more medium colors of, okay, red and yellow makes orange, so if I don't want red and if I don't want yellow, then I'm going to create an orange. We're going to go and explore the ones that are a little bit more difficult to find, the ones that stay red but half a slight orange bias, or stay in the yellows, but go towards something that is with a slight green bias, but it's still a yellow. Gaining this knowledge of color is really going to help you complexify your paintings, and most of all, it's super fun just to see that the smallest amount of paint can make a huge difference in the colors that you're able to create. Grab your set of primaries. You can put the white and the black on the side for now. Let's get to it. 7. Collecting Color Wheels: In order to create our color wheel, we first need our three primary colors, which we can set to the side just for the time being, because we are going to be creating the actual circle to put our color wheel in. If you don't have a compass, you can find something that's round. I found this cluster that's battered, but is actually the perfect size in order to create my color wheel. You can use a glass or a bowl, whatever works best for the book or paper that you are doing this on. As you can tell, I use this one in order to detour it with the pencil. Then for the inner ring, if you find something that's the right size and that's perfect, otherwise, which is what I did is, I eyeballed it and worked it and then used my eraser to correct it. Again, for the perfectionist, this does not need to be a perfect circle, just try to make it as close as you can and that's enough. Once you've done that, we're going to want to create a triangle in the middle of this circle, the points at which our primary colors are going to go. The easiest way to go about this is I find the middle point of my circle, and that is going to be the point of my triangle. I'm going to then create a base, and I'm going to just be eyeballing it here, so that each side of the triangle is approximately the same size. Now that I've done that, I'm going to create a little rectangle at each one of these corners. The size of these rectangles might change as I move forward. Then what I'm going to want to do is I'm going to create a vertical line, so this is a 90 degree angle on each one of my sides. This is going to give me the central point for my secondary color. Let's say this is red, let's say this is blue, this is going to be where my purple is going to go. I'm going to want to do this for each side of my color wheel. I want to make sure I leave enough space here so that it can be divided into two parts. I'm going to do this last one. As you can see, what I'm doing is not perfect, obviously, because I'm filming it and I'm a little constrained here by the space. My lines are a little bit wonky than they would be, but you get the gist. Now that I have this, I can go ahead and split all the other ones into two. What that means, is that between your primary colors, like let's say this is red, let's say this is blue, then I'm going to have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 boxes in between those primaries. You can definitely make color wheels that have less increments, but you won't be exploring the color mixing as much, so I find it really fun to have at least five boxes between your two primary colors. Like I said, the width of the boxes should be similar and you can tell they're not perfect here, but it is good enough for the example. Now I'm going to go in with my primary colors, and just like before, the first step is to place each one of these primary colors where they go. The colors that I'm using here are primary magenta, yellow, and sign. As I said before, you can start out with just one color wheel if you just have one set of primaries, but you can also make multiple color wheels, which I'm going to be doing in order for you to see the differences that can happen when you change the primary color that you're using. If you're making multiple color wheels, the only thing that I think is the most important is that you place your primaries always at the same spot. Let's say if this is where I put my red, then on my second color wheel, I'm also going to put my red here. If this my blue, then I'm going to put my variation on the blue here, so just so that you have a better point of comparison between your color wheels. If I want to, I can go ahead and write the names of each one of these colors. Now I want to get started with my first color swatch. The way that I like to think about it is if these are my primaries, my secondaries, like I said earlier, are going to be at the middle point. My purest orange is going to be here, my purest purple is going to be here, and my purest green is going to be here. I'm going to just write that as a reminder. Orange, green, purple. This set of particular primaries are going to create very vivid colors just by the nature of the colors that they are. If I want this to be orange, and this is my yellow, these two are going to be variations on this. This one, I want it to still stay yellow, it's just going to be yellow with a slight orange bias. This one is going to be an orange, but with a slight yellow bias. I just want to make sure that my increments are pretty clear. One way that I've found easier to do this is to first focus on this color and this color. Of course, my magenta is darker than my yellow, so I only need a tiny touch of this one to change my color quite quickly. In order to stay in the yellows, I only need tiny amount of that. You can see that this is a yellow, but just with a slightly orange issue to it. Now I can move on to my magenta with a slight bit of yellow in it. What you'll notice is that magenta that has a little bit of yellow in it, actually goes more towards a red. Now that we have these two, we can start moving a little bit closer to our secondary color. Since I have quite a lot of red here, why don't I try to go for this one which is going to be an orange reddish. It's still going to be orange, but closer to the reds. Now we can start constructing our orange, which is going to be very beautiful, vibrant orange. 8. Understanding Warm-Cool Colors: Now I'd like us to talk about warm and cool colors. In general, colors can be divided into these two categories; warm and cool, where basically, you're splitting your color wheel into two; something roughly around there, with cool colors being the blues, the greens, the purples, and warm colors being the reds, the yellows, the oranges. That's the general schematic vision of it. One other important factor is that the peak cool color is a sign. Obviously, this is a paint sign, which doesn't correspond exactly to the light sign, which would be the actual perfect coolest color ever. But it works for our purposes. Anything that is coming towards here is getting cooler. Your peak warm color is going to be a hot red orange. Those are both on opposite sides of the color wheel. So this is your coldest, this is your warmest, and your line in the middle that splits the two. When we're talking about color temperature, the most important thing is to realize that it's a relative concept, not an absolute concept. A color is warmer than another color, colder than another color. So you always have this comparison, this relativity between the two. For example, a blue is going to obviously be colder than a yellow, and a red is going to be warmer than a green. If you want to go a little bit more granular, you can look at your different types of reds. If I take two of my reds, I can say which one of these is warmer or colder. On a personal note, I'm going to tell you, that even though it might seem simple in some instances, in other instances it might seem a little bit more complicated. For example, I made a mistake for embarrassingly years when I was looking at my blues. I was looking at these two colors, cerulean and ultramarine. When I looked at these, I was like, "Oh, this one to me looks way warmer. This looks like a colder blue." Well, actually, if you place them on your color wheel, which one of these is closer to your sign? It's this one. Which one has a little bit more red in it? This one. So this one is actually much warmer than this one. Even though in my eyes, and I don't know if that's the case for you, to me, it seemed like the opposite. That's why it's a good thing to remember that your absolute peak for cold is cyan, and your absolute peak for warm colors is a hot red orange. If you refer back to that, then you'll be pretty sure to not make the mistake of confusing your warm colors and your cool colors like I did. Another thing that we can talk about, which I've actually found quite useful, warm colors advance and cold colors recede. What does that mean? It means that when you place them on the page, warm colors are going to look like the pop out the page at you. Another way of actually remembering the fact that cooler colors recede and warmer colors move forward is just thinking of how it looks when you look at the mountains far away in the distance, there is a blue haze in the distance when you look at it. That can be one way of remembering that cooler colors are the ones that recede, the ones that seem to move away from you. In the beginning, this might seem a little confusing and you might not even see whether the color is receding or advancing. But the key is to trust the process and understand that the more you become familiar with your colors, and with notions of color theory, the easier you're going to be able to see these things right away, and the better you'll be able to understand the system as a whole. I know that this notion of advancing and receding was super-helpful to me; especially in the case of my conundrum between my two blues, which I was confused about. Obviously, this is a general rule and there are exceptions. Of course, it can be a little bit more complex if you're comparing, let's say, a super vivid color with a color that has been dulled or muted. Take that principle with a pinch of salt, but consider that it can still be a useful tool if you need it. 9. Color Bias & How it Affects Your Color Wheel: Now, we're going to talk about color bias, which I've already been talking about, but we're going to be becoming a little bit more precise about that. First of all, what is color bias? Each pigment has a color bias, meaning that it leans towards one of the two other primary colors. To come back to my reds, this one looks a little bit more orangey than this one, which is more purpley. What that means, is that this one is leaning towards the yellow primary color. So it means that this is a red with a yellow bias. This one is leaning towards the blue primary color, which means that this is a red with a blue bias. Why is this important? It relates back to your color wheels. If I want to create very, very bright colors, bright vivid colors, then what I have to do, is I have to take two primaries whose biases lean towards each other, for example, if I want nice oranges, then I'm going to take a red that is leaning towards yellow and I'm going to take a yellow that's leaning towards red. By taking these two primaries that are leaning towards each other, everything in between the two is going to be very, very bright and vivid. Brighter and more vivid than if I took, let's say, a lemon yellow, which is leaning towards green. Of course, I'm still going to get some beautiful oranges in there, but they're not going to be as bright or as vivid as these two. When you mix colors that have opposite biases, that means that they're leaning away from each other rather than towards each other, then the colors you're going to be creating are going to be more muted than the ones where the colors are leaning towards each other. This might seem all super complicated, but it's more than theory so that you can see on your color wheels and understand what's happening. Why is it that these greens are brighter than these greens? Well, if they are, then it's possible that the primaries you used have opposite biases, and that's fine. Muddy or muted colors are not inherently bad. They can be very beautiful, and I have to say I absolutely love playing around with muted colors. I can choose whether I want to have something that's really punchy and bright or something that is maybe a little bit more natural, a little bit more muted, and a little bit more subtle. So play around with that. Explore and become more familiar with recognizing what is happening with your colors. Using a range of colors from something that is very bright and vivid to something that is more muted and subtle is what is going to allow you to create even more beautiful artworks. 10. Collecting Warm & Cool Colors — Exercise: For this exercise, I'd like us to take a closer look at our primaries and at the differences between warm and cool. If you don't have multiple types of reds, yellows, or blues, that's absolutely fine. Then just follow along the demo and try to identify maybe where your red or your yellow or your blue is situated compared to the ones that you see in the demo. If you do have multiple primaries than I would invite you to do the exercises as well, so that you can really get to know the paints that you have in your set. What I want us to be practicing here is gaining a better visual awareness of which colors are cooler and which colors are warmer, even if there are specific hues that are part of one color families. In the reds, I have many different types of reds, which ones are warmer, which ones are cooler? Same thing for the other primaries. We're going to do this by simply starting out with a pencil. We're going to want definitely three sections. One for our reds, one for our yellows, and one for our blues. We're going to make two little squares separated by a line. If you have three different types of reds, then you're going to do three of these. If you only have two, then you'll just do one. If you have four, then you could go all the way up to 12. But three is a good number. I also want you to make sure that you're not confusing these with these. I want you to just make a very clear separation. Just so that you know that we're talking about really three independent things. We'll do the same thing for our yellows and for our blues. The reason that we have three columns for each one of these colors is because that represents the number of possibilities. You can do these two, you can do these two, and then you can do these two. It doesn't matter in which order that you do this, so just go ahead and pick two and then we're going to start with that. You can immediately start with just the pure color here. This is my scarlet and this is my magenta. You can go ahead and write the names of the colors. Now we're going to start analyzing these. Obviously you can start very intuitively just by asking yourself which one of these looks warmer than the other. If that's something that you struggle with or you're slightly unclear on this, or even if you just want confirmation of your intuition, then you can start asking yourself, well, what is the color bias in each one of these reds? In other words, towards which other primary color does this specific red lean towards? Obviously another thing to remember is that your peak warm color is a fiery red orange in your peak cool color is a cyan blue. That can also be very helpful. Obviously I want to ask myself which one of these reds leans more towards yellow and which one of these reds leans towards blue? If you look at both of these, it appears really clear that this one has a little bit more yellow in it. It looks closer to an orangey red than this one, whereas this one, the magenta has more of a blue bias. Identifying the color bias is what helps you determine whether the color is warmer or colder. Since this one is leaning towards my yellow, which is a warm color, and this one is leaning towards my blue, which is a cold color. This one is the colder red, this one is the warmer red. I can go ahead and write that down. This has a yellow bias, this one has a blue bias. Now we can move on to the next ones. You're going to keep on doing this with all the other iterations between the reds, the yellows, and the blues in order to gain a better understanding of the bias and the warm and coolness of your primaries. Obviously, this is something that we're doing here with only our primaries, but you could actually do this exercise with any hue. You could do it with your oranges, your mixes of colors, or even if you're looking at your graze or browns, colors that are slightly more neutral. Since color temperature is always relative, getting better at identifying whether a color is cooler or warmer is going to be extremely helpful. For example, if you're looking at a painting and you love the color palette and maybe want to emulate it or be inspired by the specific colors, then you're going to be able to better identify which primaries you might need to use in order to get to the specific hue that you'd like. This is a really important exercise. I suggest that when you're looking at art, maybe try to identify, is this a colder red? Is this a warmer blue? Is this a colder yellow? Is this gray warmer or cooler than the gray that is next to it? By doing that, you're really training your eye to see subtle shifts in hue, which is always going to be very helpful in your paintings and allow you to better identify which colors you want to go for. Another thing that you can do is, since you're going to be doing three iterations here, each color is going to appear twice. Rather than just painting in one little square, you can go ahead and immediately paint two of them. Of course, when you're looking at yellows, it can be a little bit more difficult perhaps to determine because the other primary colors that we have are the reds and the blues. It can be difficult to know, well, is there are any blue in my color? Yellow is so different from a blue that it can be a little bit confusing. One way that you can make this easier for yourself is to try to envision, well, is it closer to a green or to a red? Because a yellowish green is more easy to identify. For example, between these two, obviously this one has something that looks much more orangey than this one. Since it's more orangey, then according to my color wheel, you immediately know that that one is leaning more towards a red. This one in comparison has something very crisp about it, something that could be more of a green bias, and so immediately I'm going to know, this is my warmer yellow, this is my colder yellow. When this gets even more complex is when the two yellows that you are comparing are very close to each other. This happened also with the reds over here, and it will also happen with your blues. Obviously, both of these yellows have a form of green bias that are much closer to this color than they are to this color. When two hues are very close together, like here, it can be a little bit more complicated to determine which one is warmer and which one is colder. Even more so when there's a difference in terms of transparency or opacity within the colors. My lemon yellow looks very opaque. You barely see the pencil marks underneath it, and my primary yellow is quite transparent. Even though both of these are on the colder end of the yellow spectrum, there still is a very clear difference between the two. In particular, this primary yellow looks slightly more orangish than this one. This one has that cold tinge that edges more towards green. This is the one that is warmer between the two. If you don't see that difference right away, don't worry too much about it. Just keep practicing and honing your skills so that your eyes become more accustomed to identifying whether a color leans more towards one way or towards the other. 11. Introducing Complementary Grays & Neutrals: Now we're going to enter the dark and scary world of complimentary grays and neutrals. Dark? Yes. Scary? Not so much. What we're going to do is break it down in very simple terms through these color swatches, as you can tell of pre-prepared mine and it's shaped like a T. First you're going to create a horizontal swatch that has seven boxes in it and then take the middle one and draw a vertical swatch with an added four, so five total. Then of course, what you're going to need here is your primary set. I am going to be using cyan, yellow, and magenta for this first one and a different set of primaries for my second and third swatch. If you only have one set of primaries, that's totally fine you can do all three of these swatches with one set of primaries. Obviously, complimentary graze require complementaries, and complementaries are on the opposite sides of the color wheel. We have made our own color wheels right here. Color wheels are a very useful tool when you're a painter but one thing that you need to know is that they should be used as a guide rather than as absolute truth because they are a multitude of color wheels that represent different types of things. So complementaries or colors that are directly across from each other on the color wheel, the color pairs are thus yellow and violet, blue and orange, red and green. Of course, since complementaries are directly opposite from each other then you can have any number of complementaries around this wheel and depending on the type of yellow or the type of blue, it will call for a slightly modified version of the complimentary pairs that I just told you. In order to help you with this, I've attached the link to a digital color wheel or you can get a sense of which colors are complementary to each other and which will help you determine what color you need to be creating in order to get to your complimentary grays. For example, cyan blue will not have the same complimentary as an ultramarine blue because they're very, very different blues and so they have different color wheels even if in a traditional painters color wheel they still are face to face with an orange. So what happens when you take these two complementaries that are on opposite sides of the color wheel and mix them together. As the title of this video suggests, they actually create a neutral gray or complimentary gray or neutral color. Of course, if you are able to find exact complementaries then the gray that you're going to be able to find is actually extremely neutral. However, pigments are not perfect and neither is a painter so what that means is that your grays are probably going to have more of a colored nuance to them. You're going to be creating slightly colored, muted grays. Obviously, we can talk about it in theory for a long time but I think it would be more interesting to dive right in and show you what I mean and how we can find these neutrals. Because it always sounds way more complicated than it actually is if you simply do it. 12. Collecting Complementary Grays & Neutrals - Part 1: So one thing I want to make very clear here, don't aim for a pure gray. What we're going to be looking to identify here is the most neutral gray possible relative to the two colors that you've chosen. If you're finding that you're very far away from something gray, that simply means that one of your colors needs some adjustment in order to become a little bit closer to it's actual complimentary. We're going to start out like I said, with our set of primaries and for simplicity's sake, we're going to start with a primary sign or whatever blue that you have on the left side and the complimentary of the sign on the right side. Now, that I've placed my sign, I now need to start working on my complimentary. My complimentary here is going to be a mix of my two other primaries and if I look at one of the color wheels, what I'll immediately see is that the complimentary of my sign is actually my fiery red orange. If you'll remember when we were talking about warm and cool colors this is pretty much exactly what we were saying with sine being one of the coldest colors and a fiery red being the warmest. If you have a different blue, then a sine blue, then you'll have to adapt your complementaries to your blue. You can use the tool that I indicated in the resources section in order to help you determine what that complimentary is. Am going to start building my fiery red and what you'll remember from the color wheel is that a red can be constructed with my magenta and some yellow. I'm actually going to put a bigger amount here than you'd think. Just like in the color wheel, you still want to work with increments to make sure that your color is the one that you're looking for. I don't want my red here to be two pink because we're still looking for a warmer red here, so one that has a slight orangeish bias. So now, I'm going to put this one on the opposite end of my swatch. We're going to find our strongest mid tone gray in the middle here but rather than going directly for this we're going to proceed like we did in the color wheel and proceed gradually and we're going to start with this one because our mixes are often more difficult to find. Again, I'm going to proceed little by little here, I just want my red to be slightly darker but still red but moving towards a neutral gray. So in doing this, I'm muting the red that I just created. I think this is pretty close to what we want, you can see that this read is actually going more towards a brown and I'm going to keep building the next one which is a very beautiful chocolaty brown. Now, we get to the midtone. I'm going to add a little bit more blue and you'll immediately see that shift towards something much darker and much more neutral. I can actually gauge where I'm at in this color by looking at the parts where the paint is really thin on my palate so if you look there, I can see that there's still too much of a red undertone so I'm going to go in and add a little bit more blue in order to get closer to my midtone gray. Here we're finally getting to the greatest gray that I can find. It's so dark but it's almost black and absolutes pretty crazy the first time that you experienced this, I found it really mind boggling how these three colors can create such a deep dark neutral color. From this point, what we're actually going to do is build downwards because it's easier to do it in this order so I'm going to take my white and place a good glob of it on one side. Since we're working with white, I want to make sure I don't put in too much pink too quickly so I am going to clean my brush thoroughly before moving forward. I'm going to pull some of this white into my neutral gray and this is going to really reveal the color of my gray. I'm going to take a little bit more of my white and added in. You can see here I'm a little thin on the amount of paints that I'm using here, so usually I would ask you to try to make sure that when you're building your neutral gray you build a good amount of it. For me, it's just enough but just to be on the safe side maybe make a little bit more than what I'm showing you here. If you don't have enough, that's okay, then you can just build a little bit more by pulling in from the previous colors, we're going to go one shade lighter and then one shade lighter just to explore those beautiful neutral grays and I continue my journey. Now, we're going to build the two last squares of course as you can see here on my palette, I have these whites and I want to make sure that I don't have any white in this last section. However, I still have a good amount of my initial hue which is important and my pure sine, so those are the ones that I'm going to use to continue here. I'm going to take a good amount of my blue and mix it in with my red in order to find that midtone range again. If I'm to red, I can go ahead and add some blue directly from my paint too. Now, I'm creating my muted darker blue, if you'd like you can also add a fifth one if you wanted to go even lighter. These are all dry now, so you can really get to see the huge shifting into their neutral counterparts. Now, we're going to move forward with the two other swatches and the reason I want us to do this many of them is so that we can explore other colors. What I mean by that is that if you're starting points are different than there's going to be some really interesting colors that you can get to in the middle. So for example, for this next one, we're going to start with a pure yellow on one side and the complimentary on the other, and the next one is going to be a pure magenta and it's complimentary. So I'm going to go ahead and place some of my deep yellow on the left. The yellow that I used here is more of an orangey yellow, so a yellow with a red bias. So the complimentary of this is going to be a very deep dark blue and what I'm going to use for that is an ultramarine. But I'm not just going to use an ultramarine because a complimentary has all three primaries within it, and this color is definitely not dark enough to be the exact complimentary of that so I'm going to go ahead and add a little bit of comine into my blue. I don't want to make the same mistake that I made earlier, I want to make sure that I have a good amount of paint so I don't run out of paint as I'm making my swatch. Adding this little bit of red into my ultramarine is going to create a deeper, darker blue, which has more of a purple bias. Sometimes it can be difficult to gauge how dark you want to go and I'm really going to know if I hit the nail on the head when I create my neutral gray and more specifically the tints from this neutral gray. You can already see here that I'm actually getting to a very deep color that is almost closer to a neutral gray. So it's possible that I won't be able to have as clear increments as I did over here and that's totally fine, that simply means that these two colors already have something complimentary within them which means that they're going to be even more muted from the get-go. What that means is that these initial increments are going to be quite tough to distinguish and that's not a big deal and you might end up having this with some of your mixes. If you work in small increments, its going to help you make sure that you don't miss the midtone gray that you're looking for. Like I said earlier, I can now immediately start working on my tints that come from this medium gray. Now, I'm going to move on to these two colors so I'm using what's left from my midtone and adding a little bit more yellow to it. So we're edging towards these very, very muted greens. I'm not actually sure how well you can see the colors here, but what I found was really interesting about showing you both of these is that both of these are forms of blue, and yet they take very different complementaries and the reason is because they're in a different position on the color wheel. So the tool that I attached where you can see how the color wheel works and where the complementaries are, is going to help you understand why there is not just a single color that is the complimentary of a blue. Is your blue cooler? Is your blue warmer? That's going to make a difference in terms of the complimentary that you need to look for in order to find your neutral gray. 13. Collecting Complementary Grays & Neutrals — Part 2: Now we're going to move on to the third one, and I've chosen to work with magenta and green or red and green. One thing that I want to make clear here is that if during your mixes and you notice that a lot of your colors have only very small increments. Something more similar to here where it's really pretty difficult to distinguish between your neutral gray and the initial color that you started out with. That means that your set of primaries that you're using for that initial color is already slightly complimentary and so your mixes already neutralized. That's he advantage with magenta, cyan, and yellow, is that those three create very vibrant colors. Here the increments are very clear, and you'll see also with my magenta, the increments are going to be much clear here as well. But of course that doesn't mean that the other ones, the ones that maybe are more complimentary to each other aren't useful. These are some really beautiful, bluish hues here. It's not that one of them is wrong or right, it's just that you need to know that if your paints are reacting in a certain way it might have to do with the set of primaries that you're starting out with. Complimentary colors are quite complex, but they're also pretty simple. It's really just about moving around within your colors, using the different primaries that you have and seeing what colors you need to add in order to bring it maybe a little bit more towards a greenish neutral gray, or towards a purplish neutral gray, or towards a bluish neutral gray. It's like a playground of grays, which doesn't sound really exciting, but I would say in the painting world, it actually can be super fun. You'll see in the creative exercise, we're going to really explore this a little bit more in depth where we're really going to be playing around with these neutrals. I hope that you'll start seeing the beauty that's inherent in all of these beautifully muted colors. Of course, it's not just the neutral grays that we're looking for. These colors, these colors, these colors, these colors, they are really rich, beautiful colors that can bring added depth and complexity to your color schemes. Let's start with the magenta, and of course, what you may have noticed here is that I'm working with only a single pure hue on the left side and then a mix on the right side. But you could also decide to have a mix here and a mix here. I could go for a purple here and an orange on the other side. There are many different possibilities of complementaries and a million different hues that you can find when you're playing around with the three primaries. Now we're really working with a bright magenta pink, which is much colder than my orange-red which I found here as the complimentary to the sign. In order to find the complementary of this magenta, I'm going to go ahead and build my green. I'm going to be using my lemon yellow and thoroughly in. I'm going to be looking for a very vibrant green here, in order to complement the purplish hue of my magenta, which I'm not sure if you can totally see it on the video, but again, making sure that I have enough paint here so that I can complete my entire swatches without running out. Just like anything, of course, in the beginning, it might be tough for you to recognize whether the color is the right color or not. Know that that's absolutely normal and that your eye will get better at recognizing where you are within the color wheel as you practice this, as you keep using an analyzing the colors that you see. So now I'm going to add in my magenta. I mean, look at this green. It's such a beautiful green. It's vibrant, but it's also deep and delicate. A lot of these muted tones are things that were used in landscape paintings. If you look at art history, bright colors only really come very recently in, like in modern art history. I can tell as I leave that down it's still slightly too greenish. So it's okay. I'm just going to go back and add a little bit more magenta. The neutral that I'm looking for. Of course it will have a colored hue because that's also what happens with neutrals, is that you been having underlying in undertone color, and that's what makes them so beautiful. I forgot to leave some space for my white, which is always the thing I forget to do. When you do this, don't forget to leave some space for your white on your palate. Now I'm going to keep moving slightly more towards my magenta. Something funny happened here that I think might probably happened to you as well. What you'll notice is that, in this last swatch that I did, I thought that I had arrived at my neutral gray, proceeded to make all my neutral gray tints. Then promptly realized that actually the one that was slightly more neutral gray is the one next to it. What do you do in that case? No big deal. It happens, it's a normal we're working with very subtle hues and creating grays that do have a colored tint to them. Sometimes you'll maybe not realized like I did that well, your tint is maybe more colored than it needs to be. So what you could do if you wanted was create another line down here where you're neutral gray is and finds the tints of that one. Obviously, so I made us do this t-structure for our swatches, but will you could actually do as an entire rectangle. I chose specifically not to do this because of the amount of work that that is and it's already pretty lengthy process and just to do these three swatches. But of course, if you like, you could potentially create an entire grid of all these tints, so that you can really see all those really interesting tones on the left and on the right of your neutral gray that you're looking for. I'm going to go ahead and just add this last increment here to show you the tints of this neutral gray relative to this one which I thought was my neutral gray. I'm actually secretly hoping that you may have to do this because it's definitely a part of this learning process, and it's super fun to just see all these different hues that can be created. First I need to go back and find this neutral hue. I would actually say now that these are drying even more, then my neutral tint isn't really here, but it's between these two. I'm going to actually try and find that and just add in a little line here just so that we can find where it is. This is my neutral gray. There you are my friend, and so now I'm going to proceed like I did with the other one and add some white in order to get my tints. Here, you can really see what I was picking up on once I had finished this is that this neutral gray, is much more neutral than this one which has a slightly more green tinged to it. If you're making a second one, you want to try to make sure that your values are the same, whichever side you're on. One thing I want us also just to simply mentioned, is that of course, just like each color can be warmer or cooler than another color, complimentary grays and neutrals can also be either warmer or cooler than another. For example, this complimentary gray scheme is much colder than this one. That's something that you'll also get better at identifying the more that you practice identifying warm versus cool colors and what the different inherent biases are within those colors. 14. Collecting Skin Tones — Part 1: So now, we're going to be looking at skin tones. Skin tones actually use the same colors as the complimentary neutrals where you were actually using all three of your primary colors and the reason for that is because there's actually a lot of depth and complexity to human skin tones that you just can't get if you're using only two colors. So we're going to be using all three of these. I've pre-prepared some of my skin tone swatches. So you're going to be making three squares that are five-by-five, and I chose to put them all on the same page, that's not a requirement, you can put them on several pages and make them slightly larger if that's what you'd like. Of course, since we are making skin tones, we're also going to want some white so that we can explore the tins of these colors we're going to be creating. One way of thinking about skin tones is that we're actually looking for a pie slice of our color wheel. Of course, it's not going to be these pure hues, but it is some form of a pie slice that encompasses yellow to red and the tens of these colors that we're going to find with the added complimentary. We're going to start out with the middle square because we are going to be exploring the middle and the outer edges of this pie slice of our color wheel, and this will become maybe clear as we move forward. First, what I'd like you to do is mix your first color, which is going to be on the top left and that's going to be a mid-range orange and you want to make sure that you're creating a big amount of this color because this is going to be our base color for the entire square of these skin tones. I'm going to be doing all three of these with my primary cyan, yellow, and magenta. Skin tones use the exact same colors as we did in our complimentary neutrals. You saw that already since we created a brown when we were working with one of the magentas. Using all three of the colors is what adds a lot of depth to your skin tones and makes them seem a little bit more realistic. So for this first color, we're going to add the tiniest touch of blue. Just to mute our orange ever so slightly, this is going to be the base color for first swatch of skin tones. Make sure that you've modernize your paint and we can go in and paint the first corner of this watch. I made very small squares, but you can go ahead and make big ones if you'd like. Once I've done this, I'm going to work first vertically before moving horizontally. So what we're going to be exploring vertically is the tints of this specific color. So in order to do that, I'm going to take another palette and put a good amount of white on there, and I might want to transfer some of this base color directly onto this other pallets so that I can keep this for the rest of my color swatch. Now, I'm going to work with this and I'm going to take just a touch of my white in order to start moving towards my tints. We're doing five increments here, which means it'll be another opportunity to practice finding the correct distance between each one of my increments. Once you've done that, then you want to go ahead and clean your brush and not spill water on your sketchbook like I just did. If you do, I guess it'll be fine, it'll just dry eventually. We're going to start moving on to the next swatch. Every time we're going to be moving first vertically and then horizontally. First I'm going to do this, next one, I'm going to create all the tints of this one, then I'm going to move to this one, create all the tints of that one, and continue in that way. What you've seen here is that for the vertical ones we're working on the tints, and on the horizontal axis, what we're going to be working on is adding little bits of my blue into my original orange color. So I'm going to have increasing amounts of blue for each one of these swatches. Of course, since you've done the complimentary neutrals video, then you'll know that as we move along this horizontal line, we're going to be darkening our color and getting closer to a neutral. But since we're starting out with a huge amount of orange and adding just little bits of blue, we're going to be able to stay within the skin tone ranges and obtain colors that are closer to building beautiful ochres, browns and all of greens. Those kinds of colors which are going to allow really beautiful skin tones within the tints as well. As you'll notice the color that I used is one that I had to recreate because I wasn't able to film this all in one sitting. But ideally, you would create your entire color swatch in one moment so that you can really start with your base color and work from that. Since I've had a lot of practice, I was able to find this color again very rapidly, but it can be a little bit trickier if you're doing this in multiple sittings. So now we're going to move towards the right, which means horizontally, so we're going to be adding some blue. What that means is that I'm going to be as you know, muting my color because I'm mixing all three of my primary colors. Again, I want to proceed very softly here, only a tiny touch of paint at a time, and so I'm going to go in and add another little touch of blue into my color. Adding paint little by little, and seeing the color mute ever so slightly as we move forward. When you feel like you've moved far enough, then you can go ahead and place your next color, next increment. I'm going to do the same thing as I did previously, which means take reasonable amount of this new color and place it on another palette or if you have one big palette just on another section of your palette so that I can now work vertically into my tints. We are working lighter in the lighter here, so adding more white paint as we go. 15. Collecting Skin Tones — Part 2: Once you've finished your first five-by-five swatch, we're going to move on to the next one. The order in which you do these doesn't really matter. The important thing is that the one on the top is going to be with added red and the bottom one is going to be with added yellow. What we're looking for here is actually the very outer edges of the skin tones. So that you know that obviously all the colors that are in between this are also possibilities of skin tones, beiges, browns, and olives. One of the things you want to keep in mind when you're creating these swatches is that you pretty much want the same value for each horizontal line. Of course, it's not going to be perfect, but try to get as close as you can. This is something to keep in mind for your second and third color swatch. Let's start with the red outer edge of our skin tones. Here, what we're going to be looking for is an orangeish red just so you can get a sense of those pinkish flesh tones as well. Once you've found your bright red, that is going to be the starting point of your entire swatch. Remember, don't put it just pure in the corner, add a little bit of the third primary color into this source color. Again, just a little touch of it to mute it ever so slightly. You can go ahead once you're satisfied with that and begin starting with the upper-left corner, moving vertically downwards and then horizontally, just like in the first one. Again, to move downwards, you can use a second pallet in order to take a little bit of your source color, leaving enough for the next increments and then using this as your base on which you're going to be adding your white. Now that we have both our mid-range orange swatch, our outer edge red swatch, we're going to move onto our outer edge yellowish swatch, though we're going to be looking for something that is closer to an orange, a yellowish orange, much more yellow than this, of course. As you can tell, I've prepared a large amount of this and this is something that I want to make very clear is that for your source color, you really want to be creating a big amount because you need to be creating all of these colors with that one source color. I ran into the issue with both of these of being a little bit low on the amount of paint because I hadn't made enough of my source color. Of course, this is the yellow that I'm starting out with, but like I said, we want to go towards an orange. I'm going to be adding some magenta in there, yellow is very light. We want to proceed very, very slowly with my magenta in order to get to the hue that I'm looking for. Since I am working with a lighter color here, when I'm adding my blue, I really want to make sure to go out and very, very gently because I don't want to miss out on any increments and go too dark right away. This is my source color and I can now move on with my swatch. 16. Color proportion: In this exercise, I wanted to show you one of the properties of color. If you'd like, you can also create an example page like this, so that you can experiment with it yourself. I've created two identical designs here that are very, very simple. Because the point is not about the drawing that I'm making, but really about the properties of color behind it. I've prepared a few different colors here. I've made a tinted orange, a tinted green, shaded red, and a pure ultramarine blue. I've used four colors here, but you can experiment with as many or as few colors as you'd like. I'm going to take my orange, like a peach color, and I'm going to paint this entire circular shape with it. Just making it a little wetter here because it dried out a little bit. Now I'm going to take the exact same color, but I'm going to apply it to a different part of my design, on the second one. I can actually tell I made a slight mistake here in the positioning of this section, so I'm just going to correct that. But as you can tell here, it doesn't need to be perfect, just needs to be pretty much identical. Since I still have a big shape left, I can go ahead and choose one of my four other colors in order to make this shape. I've made sure that this layer is nice and dry before painting over it and I'm going to take one of my other colors, I'm going to take the maroon and make this line here. I'm now going to take a third color. I'm going to choose a different element in the second one with which I'm going to paint this same color. You've now got the gist of this exercise. Same colors, but different objects. I made a slight mistake here. I forgot to check that my lower layer was really dry and so little bit has come through in the screen that I'm putting. But I can go over it again a little bit later. What we have here is two identical designs, using identical colors, but in different proportions. What I want you to keep in mind about this is that, of course the color scheme that you use in your paintings is going to have a huge impact on the mood or the atmosphere, the energy of your painting. But it's not just the color scheme that is going to have that impact, it's the proportion of colors and where you're placing each color. If you look at these in isolation, that one first, and then this one second, you see that they have very, very different feel to them. Sometimes you can end up creating a painting where you like the color scheme but something dissatisfies you. If you're unable to identify what it is exactly that you don't like, it possibly has something to do with the proportion of colors that you're using, and where you're placing them. Maybe the most dominant color that you used in the painting, is not the one that you would have liked to be the dominant color. In that case, it might be actually useful to try to recreate the painting using a different dominant color, and of making the dominant colors of your first one more subdued in the second one. Keep in mind, your color scheme will have a huge impact on your painting, but so will the proportion of colors. That can be an important decision. Which colors do you want to prioritize and allow to be more dominant within your image, and which ones do you want to leave as just little touches here in there, fading a little bit more into the background in order to allow your dominant colors to shine. 17. PART 2 — Creative Color Collecting: Now we're going to embark on the second part of this class, which is all going to be about creative color collecting. Whereas in the first part we were really looking at things from a technical standpoint and really trying to hone in on the details of color mixing and working with small amounts of paint in order to find the exact hue that we're looking for. Right now, what we're going to be doing is collecting colors. If you're familiar with any of my other classes, you'll know that I have a particular soft spot for creativity, for helping you get over the fear or the self-doubt that can arise when you're painting and dive into exploration, experimentation, and having fun. This second part of the class is going to be exactly all of those things with a singular focus on color. The different exercises are going to be quite gradual, but of course, if you'd like to pick and choose and jump from one exercise to another to choose your own color adventure, that's absolutely fine as well. I built them in a way that is progressive and gradual and don't underestimate the exercises that you might consider too simple. You'd be really surprised at the fun that you can have in working with simple color schemes. Each single one of these exercises is an opportunity to learn more about your color mixing, but also about yourself, your creativity and the things that are important to you while you're painting. The most important thing here is not necessarily the final result and I say that again and again and again in my classes is because I truly believe that art is not a result, it's a process. We're here to celebrate the process, the learning experience, and having fun with colors and what our minds and our hands are able to do together just to make something. That's actually one of the reasons that I chose to work in a sketchbook that isn't really made for painting as you'll see and have seen, the pages aren't very thick, so they buckle a little and they're not perfect like wash or watercolor, thick mixed media paper. Don't get me wrong if you feel like doing it on any of those, you're absolutely welcome to do so. But the reason that I did that is just to show that it's not about the results and it's really just about moving forward, making more paintings, mixing more colors and diving head over heels in love with color. If you're unhappy with any of the results of your color collecting experiments, don't worry too much about it. Remember that it's just a single painting amidst a flurry of paintings. We're going to have a bunch of exercises. I can't wait to get started because I've had a complete blast making this class and I really hope that you're going to have a blast taking it as well. One other thing, most of the paintings that I'm going to be asking you to do are going to be abstract, not all of them and this isn't a requirement. The one thing that I like about abstract is, then you don't necessarily need to worry about your capacity to illustrate a thing, to draw a thing exactly the way you'd like it to look. There's so much freedom and abstract art, and the nice thing is that since we're exploring color, then it can be a good idea to put on the side the more technical aspects of drawing or realism and just focus on the colors, the color mixing, and the abstract forms, shapes and lines that we can create. There are a few exercises where I'll be asking you to do something figurative, but there aren't that many and they're going to be quite simple. So don't worry too much if you don't have that much experience with drawing things realistically. However, if you do want to do more of these exercises as figurative paintings, that's totally fine with me, I have no problem with that. I've tried to create the prompts so that they're open-ended enough that you can explore it in the way that works for you. That to me as a teacher is the thing that I find the most important. I have tools, but you're the one who knows yourself best. You're going to be able to be the one to identify what works for you and what doesn't work for you. Make this class your own, you know in your core, what's right for you. I think that's enough talking, let's get painting. 18. Glorious Grays: For this first exercise, we're only going to need two colors, black and white. One shouldn't underestimate the amount of things that one can do with simply black and white. Obviously, this is going to be a grayscale painting and it's going to be abstract. We try to explore the widest range of tones and shades that you can between these two colors. I'd like us to go through a few more examples here of some black and white work just so that you can kind of gather some inspiration and get a sense of all the diversity of things that you can do simply with these two colors. Actually, in art history, there's a name for this particular type of painting, which used to be called Grisaille. In this kind of work, the painting was made entirely in grayscale, and it could be an underpainting for a larger work, or it could be a finished work in itself. There's a lot that you can convey simply with black and white. You can define form and shape and create scenes that are extremely realistic and life-like. But you can also create more abstract pieces where what you're really focusing on here is what these colors actually are, black and white and the textures and lines and shapes on atmosphere and mood that can be created with them. Black and white is all you need in order to convey to the viewer what you're painting is about. For example, in this piece by William Hyde, there's a lot of importance given to the building and the sky, and how almost the sky merges with the building and there's these light points that really show and illuminate the characters in this scene. But that upper part, where the building and the sky merges, it looks very abstract. The way that he created this range of deep dark, abstract grays and contrasts very starkly with those very bright white lights, creates something very mysterious and moody and gives the image a story like quality. Whether it's a figurative or an abstract piece or something in between. There's a lot of powerful energy that can emanate from black and white and different shades of gray. Layers of gray can of course give a sense of depth with the darker more contrasted layers coming forward towards the viewer and the lighter layers moving towards the distance. But even in a painting where depth is not something that is clearly realistic, those shades of gray can be used to create a more evocative, poetic, and slightly more abstract impression. It can be used to create very realistic scenes, and it can be used in very abstract scenes. The value scale can be very wide to depict an entire scene and it can also be very narrow in order to convey a sense of mystery. What's clear is that black and white are very versatile and can be used in a wealth of different ways. As we're looking through these examples of art history. Don't get caught up too much with how wonderfully amazing these are in your own exercise, just remember it's all about experimenting, getting to know all those medium colors that you maybe haven't explored as much and enjoying the journey of this grayscale black and white painting, the prompt is going to be strand, which means a single thin length of something such as thread fiber or wire, especially as twisted together with others. Let's go ahead and jump right in. See you soon. 19. Monochrome Magic: For the second exercise, we are going to be exploring black, white, and a single primary color. I'd like to show you a few examples of paintings that were made with only black, white, and one single other color. The golden age of illustration, was from the 1880's to the 1920's. During this time, there was a lot of beautiful work being made in book and magazine illustration. Of course, since these were illustrations made for printing, so newspapers, magazines, that were actually also printing restrictions, and these printing restrictions meant that illustrators had to commonly limit their palate to just black, white, and a single other color. Though that sounds really limiting, these illustrators really reveal how much you can do with only these few colors. These types of illustrations were called dual tone illustrations, and one of the most well-known representatives of this is Mead Schaeffer, who created extraordinary paintings using these monochromatic color schemes. But of course, using monochromatic color schemes or quasi monochromatic color schemes is not limited to just this specific error. There are many artists across our history, who've used very limited color schemes, including Georgia O'Keeffe or artists from the Tonalist movement. The Tonalist movement was a movement that emerged in the 1880's when American artists started painting landscapes, in a way that was very dreamlike, misty, atmospheric. James McNeill Whistler is one of the most well-known representatives of this, but of course there were other artists. David Adams Cleveland, who's an expert on the movement wrote that these restricted Earth and sky tones with admixtures of grays and blacks sometimes verging on monochrome, have the Salyut tutorial effect, like black and white photography of highlighting or dramatizing the basic components of the composition, and so emphasizing the abstract and symbolic quality of natural forms. There's no doubt that using extremely limited palettes can be a very powerful visual statement, and exploring these, more limited palettes, is something that is extremely fun. It's been used obviously, like I said in our history, but also in illustration, in block printing, and many more forms of artwork. I hope that these have given you a little bit of an idea of the kinds of things that you can do using an extremely limited palette, and give you a little bit of inspiration so that we can go ahead and create our own piece. As in the previous exercise, make sure that you're really exploring all the range of the tints and the shades and the tones that you can create with your black, your white, and your hue. We are going to actually be creating something figurative. You can either choose to do a figurative painting on a theme of your choice, or if you'd like, you can follow the prompt that I'm going to give you, and the prompt is, inner garden. I hope you will do that. I will see you soon. 20. Note about water & gouache: There's one thing that I want to make clear about the way that we use gouache. In the first part of the class where we were doing a lot of color swatches and color wheels, I asked you very specifically to not use any water, or to make sure that your brush had no water on it when you were applying the color so as not to dilute your paint. Of course, this is something that you can do in your paintings. But I also want you to be aware of the fact that gouache can also be used with very transparent layers and everything in between. You'll see me in the videos and the demonstrations that I do sometimes having a little bit more water on my brush than we did in the first part of the class. You're welcome to choose the amount of water that you find most fun to use when you're painting with gouache, and you can use all of them if that's something that you want to do. Just don't be limited by that. Even though that's something that we focused on in the first part of the class, in this second part, we can really expand the way that we use gouache and you can play around with more transparent layers if you'd like. 21. More Monochrome Magic : For this third exercise, we're going to be doing a similar exercise to the previous one, except simply using a different hue. This time we're going to be focusing on something completely abstract. I would also invite you to explore different styles of painting, so you can do something that is very precise and slow, you can do something that is fast and energetic, you can do something that's very painterly. You can do something that's very design-oriented. Try to explore and don't limit yourself to a specific style, or to a specific palette. That's also the point of this class, is to expand our horizons, and re-imagine ourselves as having many more choices than we think that we have. I'm going to give you a prompt as well. The prompt is going to be light. I hope that you enjoy this one, and I'll see you on the other side. I decided to go with primary black, white, and lemon yellow. I don't often use this set of colors, so it's a really good opportunity for me to try to do something new. 22. A Tale of Two Tones: In this one, I'm going to ask you to use black and white and two colors. Of course that means that you'll have all the tints, all the shades, all the tones and all the mixes, including the tints, the shades and the tones with those mixes. That means that even with just two single colors you're already really expanding the possibilities of your color scheme. For this one, you can choose to do something either figurative or abstract, your choice. But I will give you a prompt and the prompt is chasm, which means a deep fissure in the Earth's surface. It also means a profound difference between people, viewpoints and feelings. The word comes from Greek, khasma, which means gaping hollow. I really hope that you enjoyed this one and I can't wait to see what you make in the project section. I'll see you on the other side. The ones I've chosen for this exercise are going to be my lemon yellow and my ultramarine deep. We're going to be trying to explore all the different possibilities of these mixes. I'm going to be putting it on this side just for sake of saving space. These don't have to be connected to each other and they can be, but it doesn't have to and we'll just see how it goes. I already have my lemon yellow here which is why I decided to keep that one so that I'm not wasting too much paints though please go ahead and use whichever colors you want if you feel exploring a different shade of yellow for example. You can also try layering different colors just to see what they look like when you're taking another color and adding it onto a previous layer. Sometimes depending on the transparency of the pigments, the color underneath will slightly show through and modify that original color. Since the light is going through multiple layers of paint, it will look different than if you created that color pure. Those can be fun things to play with. 23. Oh So Few: For this next exercise, we're going to be working with a limited palette. What that means, is I'm going to ask you to choose two or three colors and create an abstract painting with these two or three colors. There's no limitation here in terms of which colors you use, it can be a tint, a shade, a tone, a specific whew, something a color that you particularly like, or another one that you want to explore. But simply pick 2, 3, maybe maximum four. But that is it. We're going to create an abstract painting, that I'm going to give you a theme threshold. If you don't know what the threshold is, I'm going to put a definition right about now. You can know what it is. Let's see what we're going to do with that. As a threshold is the prompt working in abstract here. Obviously, as I said it, if you feel like going into something figurative, that's fine as well. I hope that you enjoy that and I can't wait to see what you make. Three colors I'm thinking of going for are the darker shade of magenta, so slightly purplish magenta, and then maybe a blue, with a lot of white in it. Perhaps one other color may be something a little darker, I'm not entirely sure yet. Maybe something around here or around here, yeah. Those are the three that am considering. First we going to start painting those. Here I made a mistake. I didn't double-check that I've had no pink left. The reason is probably because my water is dirty, so I need to actually clean my water. Likely I can see it only over here, so I'm just going to switch this water, clean it. 24. Infinite Rainbows: For this next exercise, we're going to do something that is the opposite of the previous one. This time I'm going to ask you to create a painting with many different colors. Obviously, you can pick around within your color wheel or your color swatches, or even a color that we haven't created in the first part of the exercise. You can play around and just mix and match, explore, see what you can come up with. I'm going to give you a prompt as well, this is for an abstract drawing, but if you want to do a figurative, that's absolutely fine. The prompt is going to be elemental, so hope you enjoy that and have fun mixing a bunch of colors and let's see what this creates. Of course, I can put in some pure colors, but I also want to be playing around with differences in queue so I'm going to try to vary that a little bit and create mixes, of course. I could also decide to mix two more primaries just to see the vary and of course I don't want to forget that I can create tones that is shades of gray and add some color to them. Don't be afraid to play and have fun and make mixes that you aren't even necessarily deliberate where you just put colors together and see what it creates. 25. Complementaries — Rainbows in the Dark: For this next exercise, we're going to be diving into the complimentary grays and neutrals that we explored in the first part of the class. If you haven't checked that out yet or you don't know exactly what I'm referring to, you can check out the video in the first part of this class. If you do know what complimentary grays and neutrals are and you know how to make them, that's fine, then let's just dive right in. What I really want us to explore is the complimentary grays and neutrals are colors that are often underestimated and underused, especially when you're starting out. But even later on, you might forget that they exist. It's not the thing that you immediately think of. I really want us to just dive in and explore as much as possible these complimentary grays using whichever or however many primary colors that you have, three if you only have three or several sets of primaries, if you have more of them. The way that I chose to do this and you're welcome to do the same, is I'm going to be doing two paintings, one on the left side and one on the right side, simultaneously, where I'm just going to be exploring the complimentary grays on left side using my primaries and slightly adding a little bit more of this color or that color in order to get different hues within my complimentary grays. On the right side, I'm going to use a similar set of colors but this time I'm going to be adding a lot of white. I want us to be exploring the tones that we can get with our complimentary grays. We're going to have one that is quite dark on the left side and one that is quite light on the right side. I chose to do these simultaneously but you can choose to do them as two separate exercises if you want. The prompt for the darker, complimentary gray exploration is rainbows in the dark. The prompt for the lighter tones of the complimentary gray exercise is little by little. I hope that you enjoy those. You can do them like I said, separately or at the same time and I can't wait to see what you make in the project section. 26. They're All Just Eggs: Now, I'm going to be focusing on skin tones, which are a wide range of colors, and use the same base colors as the complementary greens, but in different proportions. If you are not totally sure what that means, then you can go ahead and check that out in the first part of the class. In order to explore these colors, I would like us to do two exercises as well because of the fact that they're quite complex, more difficult, and often underused in paintings that we make. There's going to be two different ones. One of them is going to be figurative, one of them is going to be abstract. The first one is going to be little faces. Since we are working with skin tones, wouldn't it be fun to actually, use it as skin tones and create as many little faces with as many different skin tones that you can think of and add maybe some little hair or a little face if you'd like. You can go as far as you'd like with this one, but keep it simple, keep it light, and have fun with it. 27. Pattern Play: For the second exercise, exploring a variety of skin tones, we're going to be moving away from the more literal, figurative idea of creating faces and skin tones, and just see them as colors, and explored the colors in and out themselves. For this exercise, we're going to be going into something abstract, you guessed it. I'm still going to be giving you a prompt, and the prompt this time is going to be pattern play. You could of course make a single pattern. You could make many different patterns, and you'll see in my exercise how I've interpreted the prompt, but enjoy the colors and the shapes that you can create with these cues. I'll see you on the other side. 28. Of Two Minds: For this next exercise, we're also going to be creating two paintings except this time they're going to be the exact same painting with two different color schemes. The reason I want us to explore this is so that you can really see how the colors that you choose can really influence the mood of the painting that you're creating. You can do something abstract here if you'd prefer. I decided to go for something figurative and the prompt is going to be leading in. There are different ways that you can go about this exercise. One of the ways is simply by intuition, trying a specific color scheme for the first one and then just trying to do something really different for the second one. If you want a little bit more guidance, then you can choose to do a warm color scheme for one of them and a cold color scheme for the second one or anything else that you can think of. The key here is really just to explore two very different color schemes and to try to notice how that affects the mood of your painting. Does it feel more peaceful? Does it feel more daring and energetic? Does it feel more mysterious or more bold? There are a lot of different ways that it can affect your drawing. Try to notice the differences that exist between the two and yeah, I look forward to seeing what you've discovered with this exercise and I'll see you on the other side. 29. Extra Tip: Creativity + Limiting Beliefs: You're almost at the end of this color collecting class and I couldn't be happier to have you here with me exploring color and challenging yourself with all these paintings. Your sketchbook, is your playground. We have not playgrounds since we were kids, so you might as well try to have fun in the one in your sketchbook. Remember, let your sketchbook be your playground. Another really interesting thing that you can do in order to keep pushing your exploration of color, is that when you create a painting, when you collect colors, try to identify the mood that is created. Maybe jot down a few words. What does it evoke? What is the mood in the atmosphere that your colors are conveying? How can they be different from one another? Ask yourself as many questions as possible, stay curious, and don't limit yourself arbitrarily to just a few color schemes. There's this pervasive belief that obviously, we all want to find our style, we want to find our voice. But when it starts becoming a problem, is when we create these arbitrary barriers for ourselves. It's not because you've found a certain type of color scheme or a type of style of painting that it means that you need to stay stuck in that. Creativity is not about rigidity, it's about flexibility, it's about openness, it's about innovation. Don't box yourself in to a specific type of painting, don't box yourself into a specific color scheme. There are so many things that you can pull from and they can all be you. I hope that some of these ideas will resonate or make you at least question maybe certain assumptions that you've had or certain self-limiting beliefs about yourself, about what you're capable of. There are so many ways that we get in our own way. What I hope with this class, is that you've seen that there are so many other things that you can do than you think you are even capable of. Good luck with all your color collecting. 30. Inspiration part 1 — Beauty of Mud: For this next set of exercises, I'm going to ask you first, to create a Pinterest board, or collection of drawings or paintings, where you like the color schemes. In particular, I'm also going to ask you to choose a wide variety of color schemes. Not just a single type of color scheme, but a lot of different ones that maybe touch on some of the topics that we looked at in the first part of the class. Make sure that you also have a mix of abstract and figurative drawings, as the next exercises are going to be needing both abstract and figurative pieces. In total, you're going to be needing two abstract pieces and two figurative pieces, but I'm going to give you a little bit more detail on that as we move forward with the exercises. For this first one, I'd like to ask you to choose a figurative painting, that has very muted colors and that you particularly enjoy. It can be anything, something from art history, an Illustrator that you like, literally anything that you find that it's figurative and has a muted color scheme. As a reminder, there are different ways of muting your colors. You can mute them with white, you can mute them with black, you can mute them with gray, so tones, you can mute them with complimentary grays, and you could, if you extended your palette, mute them with an earthy color such as raw sienna, or raw umber. But for the purpose of this class, it may be fun to just mute them with the other colors. What we're going to be doing here, is using this piece as inspiration for a new color collecting painting. The first step is going to be trying to identify the colors that are present in this muted figurative piece that you chose and trying to find those colors by mixing your own colors. Of course, you're going to want to try to get as close as possible to the image that you chose as you can. If you're not able to get the perfect hue that you're looking for, don't stress out too much about it, the key is to really just get as close as possible. Practice finding hues depending on what you're looking for. Once you've identified and been able to mix the colors that you see in the original painting, we're going to create our own painting. But in order for it to stay a study and our own creation, and to not have it be a copy or a reproduction of the piece that we are looking at, I'd like to invite you to create an abstract piece of work, inspired by this figurative one. Once you've found the colors of that painting, you can then put it to the side, maybe close your computer, or your book that you found it in. Don't look at it anymore, and simply use those colors as your starting point for your abstract piece. There are other things that you can be inspired by within the piece. For example, if there are certain textures that you liked, or perhaps the proportion of colors, then you can absolutely use that as inspiration. But make sure that you're really just exploring the color scheme because that's the most important thing here, and you're using that as a springboard to create your own piece of artwork. This is going to be super fun, I'm really excited about this exercise and I can't wait to see how you're going to interpret it. If that's sufficient for you and you want to go ahead and dive right in, then please do. If you need a supplementary prompt in order to get you a little bit more inspired and going with this abstract piece, then know that you can use the prompt that I'm going to give you, which is wholeness. The painting I chose is actually an illustration from a comic strip illustrated by Thomke Meyer, who's an illustrator based in Hamburg. He makes really beautiful work and in particular, his colors I find really poetic and beautiful. I wanted to explore this color scheme in particular because of its beautifully muted qualities. As you can see, there are two panels in this comic strip, and I chose to specifically focus on the first panel and to completely ignore the bottom second panel. First thing that I'm going to do is try to identify the colors in my image and recreate them. Obviously, you don't want to be too perfectionist here. If you're really struggling to find the color, that's okay, that's also very normal, but try to get as close as you can. You don't need to use all of the colors, but use a good, reasonable number of the colors in the image. I'm going to go ahead and try to figure out what these colors are by doing a few tests. To me, this yellow that I'm looking for is actually a little bit muted. It somehow feels like it's not totally saturated and which is why I'm using the complementary, in order to mute it a little bit and get it slightly closer to what I'm seeing in the image. This is still much to break. I'm going to go ahead and use a scarlet just to mute it a little bit. This is already much closer to the kind of color that we're looking for. I think this is close enough. We have a nice purplish, a warmer purple, a colder yellow, and a colder blue. Now I'm going to create the complimentary grays that are the darkest ones that you can see here. My impression is that they're very slightly bluish or purplish. I'm going to take the same cobalt blue. We're going to be working with complementaries here, so I'm going to go for the cool blue, the cool red, and a cool yellow. Making it this nice complimentary neutral, starting to look good, quite dark, which is what we want, but I'm going to make it slightly more bluish and maybe slightly more reddish. This one's good, but it looks slightly to bluish for me. I'm just curious and I'm going to go ahead and add a little bit of magenta. Now that we've found most of the colors, we can go in and start making this painting. When I was looking at the grays in this image, it didn't just look like a simple black and white and gray, it had a lot more depth to it, which is why I determined that it was more of a complimentary gray, than a regular black plus white mixture. As I'm looking at this, I'm realizing that this one is actually much darker than the one in the image. That's fine, I'm just going to tone it down just a little bit. I think I did pretty well on this blue. Now I'm going to go and test it next to our yellow, just to confirm that it's smaller. 31. Inspiration part 2 — Quiet Places: For this next exercise, I'd like you to choose an abstract piece of art work, and use that as your new starting point in order to create a figurative piece of work. Of course, same as the previous exercise, the first step is identifying the colors that are within that painting and trying to find them with your newly acquired color mixing techniques. Try to get as close as you can. Don't be too much of a perfectionist, and then start making a figurative piece. If you'd like a prompt, I've come up with one. Don't feel like you need to follow this if you don't want to, but if you'd like, then you can use it. The prompt is going to be a secret place. I hope that you enjoyed this one, and I'll see you on the other side. So I have my phone here on the side with my abstract painting that I chose. My first step is going to be finding the colors of that painting. There are few colors that might be slightly more difficult for me to create because the pink in particular is like a neon pink, which is a very particular color which I probably won't be able to get that pure, saturated hot pink effect. I would need a single pigment paint in order to find that. But I can't get close with my magenta. I'm going to try to do that. As you can tell, it's a very cooled pink. Since I'm going to be using white in order to get to this color, my color is going to be more muted and less vibrant than the one in the painting. This is going to be a nice approximation, flat. I'm also going to be wanting to find this turquoise teal, and I think I going to be using the [inaudible] in order to try to get to that. Again, it looks like quite a cold color, so I'm going to be working with my lemon yellow, and some white. I also cold red. It looks almost like a pure scarlet. Then a very deep blue. Actually it looks slightly warmer. But I'm going to double check by looking at my color swatches, and it actually looks quite close to the navy blue. So I'm going to go with that one. I'm just going to double check that I have all the right colors. Yes, we're pretty close. 32. Inspiration part 3 — Looking for Leprechauns: For this next exercise, I'd like you to go back and identify another figurative painting in your collection of paintings that you found. This time I'd like you to choose the figurative painting where there's a color scheme with many different colors. Perhaps these are colors that you wouldn't necessarily go for. But there's work in this piece and that you enjoy to a good enough extent that you'd like to explore it. I'd like you to take that piece and this time we're going to do the same exercises as earlier where we're going to create an abstract piece inspired by the color scheme of this figurative painting. As in the previous exercise, you can also gain inspiration from some of the textures, or the Lima Merck, or the composition. But keep it your own, keep this painting true to yourself and to your work. Enjoy it, have fun with it. We're collecting colors and trying to find things that we wouldn't do naturally in order to expand our horizons. The prompt is going to be growth. I hope you enjoy this one and I look forward to seeing what you'll make with it. For this exercise, I chose a painting by Henri Manguin, who's associated with the Fauvisim movement or the Fauvers , which were in the beginning of the 20th century and are characterized by their use of very bright saturated colors. As you can tell here, that are a lot of different colors in this painting, which is going to be a really interesting challenge, and I'm going to not necessarily use absolutely every single one of them, but I definitely want to have that range, that diversity of colors as much as possible. That's what I'm going to focus on right now. Some of the brightest colors here. There's a very vibrant cold red, like the Scarlet, which I think is placed quite purely, and that's something that the Fauvers are very well known for, is using pure colors. Obviously, there still are a bunch of muted colors as well, so, I'm going to have those and I just want to make sure that I have enough of each single one of these colors. We obviously have this big range of different blues. I would say there's a range from very warm blues to colder blues. There are also some pinks, some deep yellows, some oranges, and even some muted complimentaries. 33. Inspiration part 4 — A Vivid World: For this exercise, I'd like you to go ahead and choose a painting that is abstract but has very vivid colors in it. Obviously, you want it to be slightly different from the one that you just did. Go ahead and explore and find something that works for you. Again, here we're going to be working from an abstract piece and creating a figurative piece inspired by the colors of this abstract piece. If you're wondering what kind of painting that you should create here, remember that there are many different things that you can explore. For example, you can play around with texture. You can play with soft edges versus hard edges. Varying shapes. Something that's more painterly, something that's more precise, something that's more minimalist, something that's maximalist, if that word exists. There are a lot of different things that you can keep exploring here. Go ahead and have fun with this figurative piece, the prompt this time is going to be time. I hope you enjoyed that and I'll see you on the other set. For this final one I chose a painting by Jenny Prinn called Late Night Storm Glow. The reason that I chose this specific one is because these are colors that I really don't use very often in my work. Any interest of the class and of challenging ourselves for this last one, we really want to try something that we haven't really tried before. As you can tell, some of these colors are quite bright, and just like in the previous abstract painting where I had that neon pink that would be quite difficult to reproduce, I'm going to have the same issue here. I'm going to be able to find something similar but it won't have, probably, the vibrancy that the original has because of the fact that it is probably a single pigment that has that vibrant neon pink color. Regardless, I'm going to try to get as close as I can to these colors and have fun with it. Let's get started. 34. Shifting Perspectives: For this exercise, I'm going to ask you to choose a color that you would hate. Yes, that you hate. For example, you could look back at your color swatches and maybe identify a color that you're like, "Never going to use that, that's like the worst color." Or you could create a mix of colors where you're like, "Yeah, this is a color that I think I would never use." The challenge in this exercise is, we're going to start out with that color and try to create a color scheme that beautifies that color. Because I would argue you that no single color is a terrible color. If you take a color that you think is really gross, but you play around with a multitude of color schemes, then you'll find that certain colors will beautify them, bring out the beautiful properties of these colors that you hate. This one might be challenging, and I hope you embrace the challenge because you'll see that it can be super fun. If you don't end up finding a color scheme that makes you change your perception about that initial color, that's fine too. The key here is really to collect colors and to experiment. Maybe you could try it another time with another color scheme to try and see if there's another way that you can end up enjoying this particular color. I hope you enjoy the challenge, I'll see later. One way to help you identify the color that you don't really like is by going back to your color swatches and looking at them and identifying if there's one of them that you just find not really a pure [inaudible]. I actually would say that some of my colors that I don't often go for are these really bright yellows and oranges, but since in the previous exercises, I was already exploring that, I'm going to look for another color that I don't really identify with. The one that I'm honing in on here is these yellow ochres mixed with black. Yellow ocher in itself is a color that I don't often use and even less so, these muddy, brown, greenish color that you get with the yellow ocher when you mix it with black. I'm going to go ahead and start with that one because it's one that I don't often use and see where that goes and how I can really bring out the beauty that exists inherently in this color. Just right off the bat here, when I look at these, I think that it would be really fun, perhaps to have a very deep dark forest green with these colors. Because a dark forest green, like a cold forest green would maybe really contrast nicely with the warmth of these colors here. Perhaps, one of these greens that I can get with ultramarine blue and lemon yellow, maybe mixed in with the little black. That's the initial idea that I have but I'll see as I move along if I will add anymore colors to that. You can already see here, right of the bat, that these two colors are actually going to really nicely compliment each other and then this type of green is going to bring out the kind of greenish quality of my yellow ocher here. 35. Love All Around: So by now I'm guessing that you are quite tired because we have been doing a bunch of paintings, this next one is going to be very simple. You'll want to pick a color that you absolutely love and create a monochrome painting. Why are we going to do this? The thing is we are here to collect colors, to celebrate our love of color. Let's celebrate it, find this one color that you think is absolutely beautiful and cover your entire page with it. That when you flip through your skip sketchbook, you have something that really just radiates joy back at you. It's simple, but it's fun, and I hope you enjoy it. I'll see you soon. 36. Translating Sound: For this next exercise, I'm going to ask you to choose a piece of music that you particularly love. What we're going to do is we're going to translate sound into color. We're going to be using the music as an inspiration for this piece. This is an exercise that you could use over and over again with different pieces of music and different color schemes. There is no right or wrong way to do this, so I hope you enjoy it and I can't wait to see what you create. Now that you've chosen your piece of music, there are a few ways that you can move forward. Of course, the first, which seems maybe the broadest but not necessarily the easiest, would be to simply work with your intuition, start feeling and getting an impression of perhaps colors or textures that you want to use in your piece and just let the music fill you and translate itself into color. If you find that a little overwhelming or struggling with how to start this out, then you can try to do something a little bit more granular. For example, you can take a moment to listen to the music and identify perhaps certain instruments or certain sounds. Try to think about which color that instrument or that sound evokes. Another way of doing it is to identify the rhythms. Are the rhythms fast? Are they slow? How would you translate that into something visual? If you're finding that still too overwhelming, then make your choice even more granular. Work with one instrument, one sound, one texture, and decide which color you think would best fit that mood that is emanating from the music. Of course, there is no right or wrong way to go about this exercise so find a way that works for you, and let yourself be filled with the music, the colors, the textures, the lines, and maintain that inner sense of creativity, of flow, of being in the present moment, a sense of curiosity and exploration. [MUSIC] 37. Bonus Add-On: Using Leftover Paint: If you have a moment where you have some colors leftover in your palette and you've finished your painting just like I did. I think I'm done with this one. Well, you can just always open your notebook to another page in order to use the paint that you have left and create a new collection of colors that you might not have explored otherwise. Something fun in this notebook that I have is that there are a few pages that are actually gray rather than white, so that can also be fun just to see what it's like to paint on a surface that is not white and see how that affects your color mixing. 38. Bonus Add-On: Redo One: If you followed along and done all the exercises up until now, then you probably done about how many? Maybe 19 paintings, maybe 18, something like that. I'm not quite sure what the exact number is. But you've done a bunch of paintings. First of all, congratulate yourself because that's pretty amazing to have come this far and explored that many color schemes and challenge yourself in that many different ways. Take a moment to also just celebrate everything that you've accomplished up till now. For this next one, what I'd like you to do is to look back at all the different ones that you've created and maybe identify one exercise where you feel like you did it but you think you could have done better. You maybe didn't explore the range of colors enough, or you felt stuck on this particular exercise. You felt like you didn't learn as much as you could have when you were doing it. We're going to get a second chance here. We're going to take that specific exercise and we're going to do it again, this time, slightly different. You don't need to do the exact same thing that you did in the first run. The point here is to try another version of the same exercise. Alternatively, if you feel like you actually explored all these exercises really well and you don't see which one you could have done any better. Or if you're just sick [LAUGHTER] of challenging yourself because, don't get me wrong, I have been challenging you a lot during this class, if you need a break from the challenging yourself thing, you can decide we do an exercise that you thought was super fun, you could of course, choose to use the same color palette that you did in the initial one, but you could also choose a different one. The thing that I want us to hone in on with this exercise is that all the exercises that we've been doing up until now are exercises that you can do over and over again. Especially if you're not really satisfied with some of the paintings that you made or some of the explorations that you did. It's not like these paintings are set in stone and the exercises are there to help you learn things and appreciate the process of collecting colors. In that spirit, let's move forward on this one and choose either an exercise that you want to explore again, for whatever reason, be it positive or negative. I'll see you on the other side. 39. Last 5: You are the Key: As we moved through this class, I gave you a range of different exercises to explore. Now, I'd like to open this up a little bit more. Everything that we've done up till now has been collecting colors, collecting different color schemes, and trying to figure out, maybe which color schemes feel most like you. In this final part, I'd like to invite you to start creating your own rules. What I mean by that is that color collecting is something that you can do over and over and over again. I've been here to show you different ways that you can go about this. But of course, you are full of resources and now it's your turn to really try to collect colors and continue this process of challenging yourself, of broadening your horizons and creating new color schemes. In this spirit of exploration and love of color, I'd like you to create five paintings. It can be one a day, it can be one every two days. It can be five of them in one day, where each painting is an exploration of a different color scheme. It can be a few colors, it can be many colors, it can be a mix of complementaries with vivid, it can be completely muted, it can be any range of colors that you can imagine and create. You've learned so much up until now, and you have the tools to become your own teacher. 40. The Journey Is Just Beginning: Did you get to the end of this? I think we're done. If you have done every single one of these exercises, I'm impressed because I know it's a beast of a class, and I think you're super proud of everything that you've accomplished up till now. I really look forward to seeing what you feel like sharing in the project section, whether it's a single painting or 25-30 paintings, your color swatches, your color wheels and everything in between, I really look forward to seeing it. If you're curious to see when my next class is coming out, then be sure to click on the follow button in my profile which should be over here, I think. Other than that, if you're looking for me, I'm on all social media. I'm on Instagram, I'm on YouTube, I'm on Patreon, where I also do really fun live drawing sessions, where we hang and share music and talk about random things, so if you want to come and join that, you're welcome to join me there. I also have five, maybe six other classes. If you're curious to see them, you can check them out in my profile. I have classes that range from unleashing your creativity, drawing without fear in five simple exercises I have a class all about and growing plants and leaves, and growing your visual library. I have one that's about abstract watercolor painting and how you can do things that are more planned or that are more free form. I have another one that is if fearless art challenge, a 14-day drawing challenge with many different prompts. I have one about the brush pen, which is one of my most favorite tools, and I think that's said them all. Have I said them all? In any case, I hope to see you in any of those classes or on Instagram, or Patreon, or YouTube or whatever else. Thank you again so much for being here. It's a pleasure to be able to teach you classes, it's an honor. This makes me emotional because this is what I really hope that you will take away from the class, is that you can be your own teacher. You've learned so much and you can keep learning and so much more. Please continue exploring, make some figurative art, make some abstract art, make anything in between. Make things that you love painting and that you enjoy painting. If you felt only a little bit of joy, then celebrate that. Remember, that painting is not a result. It's a process, it's a journey, it's a lifetime of creativity. So embrace every single part of the journey, whether it's the valleys or the mountains, the self-doubts or the successes. There's so much to be learned every step of the way. It's an honor to be a small part of your artistic journey, and I wish you all the best in your future endeavors. I'll see you soon.