Color Theory 101: Using Color in Art & Design

1. Color Theory 101: Introduction: Hi, my name is Arielle. I'm going to teach you the basics of color theory 101. Whether you've been intimidated by color or just not sure how to use it, this class is for you. We're going to explore color through acrylic paint, and by the end of the class you'll understand how to read a color wheel, what colors go with other colors and how color works together, and you'll learn how to mix your own paint so that you can create some fun projects and make your own color wheel. Then pick one of two projects to create either an abstract art piece with your own color scheme and acrylic paint, or a dimensional piece again, with the color scheme of your choosing. But by the end of the class, you'll have mastered color and you won't be afraid to use it anymore, and you can go forth and use color throughout your life in all different ways based on the theory of color and the color wheel. 2. Color Theory 101: Class Supplies: Hi everybody. I'm so excited you're here to learn more about color. For this class, you can use any color medium you want. But I'm going to teach the class using acrylic because it's affordable and easy to pick up at any local craft store. If you want to use oil or water color or whatever you have, that's fine too. But let's just go over the supplies you'll need if you want to follow along with the same things, I'm using. The first thing is, is you'll want to pick up some acrylic paint. I like Liquitex BASICS. Is something affordable and easy to start with, but you can use just any acrylic paint from your craft store. You can use golden. You can use artist's Loft. There's lots of brands out there. Which one doesn't really matter as long as you're picking up really your primary colors of red, yellow, and blue, and then a white and black to mix those with. You're also going to want to pick up some brushes. I like a basic flat brush and then I have a smaller detail brush. But really any craft brush will do fine. A palette knife to mix your paint. These you can pick up a nice metal one that you can reuse. They also sell packs of plastic ones at most craft stores. What really matters most is this flat surface here that's going to make it easiest to mix your paint. You'll want a color wheel, of course, because we're learning about color. You can pick these up at a craft store, on Amazon. This pocket color wheel is going to really give you a true guide to the colors so that you can reference that when mixing. The front has all of your different colors and then the back has your tints and shades as well. You'll want something to paint on. You can use a Card Stock. I wouldn't use print on paper. It's going to work pretty easily, but bristle. I like Strathmore's acrylic. It mimics canvas, it's a little thicker. It's not going to warp when you paint on it or load too much paint. Then parchment paper makes a great palate. It's disposable, it's waterproof. You can also use wax paper. You can use a waxed paper plate. You can use aluminum foil. If you have a plastic palette, you just need something that makes your paint on, and then of course, a water container. I like mason jars because they're easy to reuse and they've got the nice slip at the top. But plastic cup, whatever you got something to hold your water and clean your brushes with and then paper towels of course. For our projects at the end you can choose one or either or both, but you'll need a couple more things for that. Washy tape if you're going to follow along with the first project. Painter's tape, anything like that works as well. The second project I'd recommend a circle template. If you don't have one, you can trace a bottle cap or a jar or any small circle. Also want some foam core or cardboard or something to lift your shapes off of the page. So that's it. Gather your supplies and we'll go ahead and get started. 3. Color Theory 101: The Color Wheel: Let's talk about color. You should have your pocket color wheel. I've also made up a quick color wheel here that we'll talk about in a minute to make things a little easier to see. But reading your color wheel, you've got all of your colors around the outside, and then the really nice thing about this pocket color wheel here is that you've got this piece in the middle that spins, that shows you really quickly and easily if I add blue, or I add white, or red, or yellow, what that's going to give me. Let's look at green in here. If I add blue, I'm going to get this nice blue-green color, which is my next color on the color wheel. If I add yellow, I'm going to get yellow green, which is my color over here. If I add red, which is its compliment, I'm going to start to get a browner color. Working your way around the color wheel, you have a few basic things. You've got your warm colors here which start at your red violet and go around, and your cool colors which start at yellow, green, and come back around to red violet. When you hear talk about color, you're going to hear talk of your primary colors, which is red, yellow, and blue. Those are your basic pigments there, and then you're going to hear about your secondary colors that you get by mixing your primaries, which is orange, green, and violet. Those are easy to find because they're the split distance in between your primaries on the color wheel. The next you'll hear about are your tertiaries, which is going to be your red violets, your yellow oranges, your yellow greens. Those are the ones that are going to be your mix with your primary color and your secondary color next to it, and you could see one in between. Colors has a lot of psychology to it, you'll hear about fast food brands using red because it's bold and it inspires quickness, or orange because it's said to inspire hunger. You'll see a lot of blue, and green, and violet, your cool colors and places like spas because they induce calm. Yellow is considered a really bright and sunny happy color. So you'll often see it with things that you want to see associated with joy or vibrance. Your basic colors all the way around the color wheels, those are going to be your hue. Your hue is your blue, your violet, that's the name of your particular color. Value is going to be your relative lightness or darkness of your colors, so it's going to be based on your gray scale on, is it going to be darker or lighter? How much white or black you've added? The intensity is going to be or saturation you might hear is going to be the purity or brightness of that particular pigment. All of those things together are what make up that term you've traditionally heard of color. The other thing you'll hear that is shown on the back of your color wheel here is tense tones and shades, and that's going to be, so you'll see here you've got your tent, and your tone, your shade. That's going to be if you add white, a neutral gray, or black to your color. So we'll get a little more into using tens tones and shades when we get to our project at the end of this class. One of the things that's going to be most valuable when using color, and you'll see a little more clearly here is your color schemes. Your most basic of your color scheme is going to be your monochromatic. That's if I pick any of these colors, let's say red, and I just use tense tones or shades of red in my color scheme, that's going to be a monochromatic color scheme. If I use three colors or for colors that are next to each other on the color wheel, that's called an analogous color scheme. Those go together because they're just blends of each other and they're going to go really nicely next to each other. So you can have a warm analogous color scheme or you might see really cool, rich blue or violet analogous color scheme. The one you'll see most often is your complementary color scheme. That's going to be any colors that are directly across from each other on the color wheel. There is a reason red and green go together so well at Christmas, it's a complimentary color scheme. One of my favorites is split complementary, so I'm going to find a complement and then I'm going to take the one on either side. So split complimentary would be red and then blue-green and yellow-green, or it could be violet and yellow-green and yellow-orange. So you take whatever's directly across, that's its compliment, and ignore that one and use the one on either side. That's a split complementary color scheme. The other comment and very basic color scheme that you'll see is a triadic. That's going to be if you make an equilateral triangle anywhere on the color scheme. So your primary colors of red, yellow, and blue is going to be a triadic color scheme, and the same way that your secondary triangle of your green, your purple, and your orange, that's a triadic color scheme. Anywhere you draw that equilateral triangle on your colored wheel. Another one you'll hear about is a tetrad, or you might hear it called dual complimentary. That means two complimentary color pairs together. If you want four colors in your color scheme, so here for example, blue and orange are compliments, yellow and violet are compliments. I could use all four of those together in a color scheme, and that would be considered a tetrad of a color scheme or a dual complimentary color scheme. Looking at those, start thinking about what colors do you like together. Look at different compliments on the color wheel, is it red and green? Is at blue and orange? Is it yellow-green and red-violet? Those your compliments, so you're looking at a triad, or you looking at a split. Think about those as you start to think about the colors that you want to use in your final project. You'll see here I made this color wheel by mixing my paints together and we're going get into that in the next lesson. So go ahead and grab your paints in your brush and we'll get into mixing paints. 4. Color Theory 101: Mixing Colors: Okay. Now that we've learned about colors and a little bit about how they work with each other. The next thing we're going to learn to do is mix our colors. You've got your color wheel that we've talked about here. This is really important because we're going to use this to match all of these colors here. This will be a really great exercise and learning how to mix your paint. First thing we're going to do as an exercise is just go ahead and make our own color wheel so you can learn how to mix all of these colors. Your obvious ones, you've got your basics. You've got your yellow, and you've got your blue, and you've got your red. Go ahead and put a little bit of each of those on whatever you are you using for your palette. I'm using my parchment paper here that we talked about earlier. I'm going to put each of those down here and then I'm going to grab my palette knife and let's say that we want to make a yellow-green. Right now my yellow is a little bit more of the yellow-orange. That's okay if you've bought basic Kraft paints in general. A really nice, bright lemon yellow is what's going to give you this yellow but again, work with what you've got. Don't worry about spending too much money on materials for now. This is really just about learning the basics. But I want to make yellow green. I'm going to grab a little bit of my blue, and I'm going to grab a little bit of my yellow, and I'm going to mix those together using the flat of my knife and mixing. Now, this is looking really dark for what's on my color wheel here. I'm going to go ahead and add a bit of white to this. You can buy all of your paint colors so that you don't have to mix all of your colors all the time. This is just a really fundamental exercise. It's great to know how to mix because you're going to spend less money on your paints overall. You're going to be able to make any color you want, which is really great. I'm going to add a little bit more yellow to this and just keep adding, keep playing until you feel like you're getting close to that color on the color wheel. This is getting there. It's still feels a little blue, I'm just going to keep mixing on that. Add a little more yellow. It's feeling a little muddy but it's getting there. Sometimes it goes through some weird colors before you finally get to what you want. You want to scrape up what's on the bottom there and mix that back in. That flexibility of the palette knife is what makes it so great. It's what you're not going to get out of like a plastic utensil knife from the kitchen. That's why I recommend working with an actual palette knife. You'll see I'm adding smaller quantities of yellow now as I get closer to that color that I want. That's pretty close. It's not quite as bright and if I had that real lemon yellow, we might be getting there a little bit closer. But for the purposes of this, you can see how taking those three basic colors: a little bit of blue, a little bit of yellow, a little bit of white. We've gotten pretty close to that yellow-green and you saw before I started out in the white, we were looking at a lot closer to that true green that we were mixing there. Let's go ahead and mix one more just so that you get a little more practice with this. I'm going to clean my palette knife off here, which is really easy. Just wipe it off with a paper towel and let's make a red-orange. For this, I've got my red and it's going to be a primarily red color here like you can see, my red is a little bright. There's a little more yellow to that. I'm going to grab my yellow from where my blue is not touching for my mixing before. I'm just going to start mixing that in there. Using both sides of my knife, making sure I'm smashing all that paint off of there every so often you see this is still pretty red. I think I want to add a little more yellow. Add that in. Red is a pretty strong color as a pigment. Sometimes you do have to add more or less depending on the purity of your pigments, the type of paint you are using. The pigments in your more expensive paints are going to go a lot further than your inexpensive Kraft paints. But again, for the purpose of this, you don't need to spend a lot of money, just grab whatever Kraft paints you got. That's getting pretty close. I think I want to add just a little more yellow, getting there. Maybe a little more and like I said, sometimes what I'm grabbing seems like a lot more than a little but you'll see as it gets mixed in, it really does combine and get less there. Great, that's pretty close. What I want you to do is to keep practicing mixing your paints. Go ahead and work all the way around your color wheel and practice mixing one of each of these colors. If you have more than your regular blue, that's fine but go ahead and just on a scrap sheet of paper. Go ahead and mix up one of each of your colors and then we're going to use this in the next part of our exercise. 5. Color Theory 101: Project 1, Step 1: Now that we've learned about the basics of color and how to mix your colors, let's go ahead and start with one of our first two projects. I'm going to cover two project options here. Feel free to do both or just one, but I'm going to go ahead and go over the first one now and then we'll get into the second one. So I've got my piece of paper, my Strathmore-acrylic that has that tooth-like canvas to it, and I've got a roll of washi tape. What I'm going do here is first I'm going to tape out a rectangle on my sheet of paper. You can get close to the edges, you can set it in a little bit. I like to set it in a little bit so that if I decided to put the center frame or hang it up, it's got that kind of border to it. You can just rip your edges off, don't worry about them being clean because you're going to overlap those with your other pieces of tape here. It doesn't have to be a perfect rectangle, you can outline one with a ruler if you want, but certainly not necessary. You can also use painter's tape for this or masking tape. I use washi tape because it's inexpensive and it comes up really nice and clean. It's a paper tape, it rips really easily, you might also have other uses for it if you'd like to, scrapbook or do anything like that, I tend to keep several roles on hand. It comes in fun patterns and things too, which is great. I'm going to grab my scissors for this next bit just so that I get slightly cleaner edges, but what I want you to do next is just start taping off a geometric pattern inside your rectangle. There doesn't need to be any real rhyme or reason to this, just shapes that you think are pleasing. I really like triangles, so I'm probably going to do something like that. Your lines don't always have to go all the way across, they can connect in between, make different sizes, I can make different triangles in here or different shapes like that. So just work on your pattern until you find it statically pleasing to you. The nice thing about this is as I get my pattern put down, if I decide that I really don't like a particular shape or I don't like how it looks, I can just peel up my tape and try something different since it is so easy to take up and put down. I recommend starting from your line that's inside your shapes so that you can run your tape out to the outside without having to worry about any really clean lines or anything like that, but if you do have, like I'm going to make some shapes on the inside here, just make sure that your tape ends within the lines of your other tape. Because otherwise you'll see the line from the edges of those as you peel up your tape at the end of the exercise. Just keep making shapes until you've got it how you want it. I'm going to add just a couple more here to give this what I think is the right amount of visual interests. You could even, if you just wanted to tape off a plain thread with rectangles or anything like that. You could get adventurous with some curbs, although I find those can be hard to do with the straight edges of washi tape. I think that's just about it. I'm going to make this a little more smaller, and I'm going to add one more piece right here in the middle. You can see there's not a ton of rhyme or reason, and see here I've got that edge. I want to make sure that that doesn't happen, so I'm just going to lift that up and trim away that corner. Then just run your fingers over this and make sure especially your edges are all down, nice and smooth, flat to your paper so that you can paint right up to it and get a nice crisp line. I've gone ahead and mixed up some paint. I decided to go with a complimentary color scheme, so I went with blue and orange, and then I went ahead and mix some tints of those and I did that just by adding white. I really love blue and coral together. It's the colors in my office, so this is great because I can hang it up there. Go ahead and pick whatever color scheme you want. It can be tetrad, it could be complimentary, it can be analogous, it can be all, monochromatic and shades intensive one color, but go ahead and do that and go ahead and mix up all your paint. Remember to use your palette knife when you do this, you don't want to mix paint with your brushes because that's a really good way to ruin your brushes. Your palette knife is going to be easier, you know, use that flat surface, use the bend, make sure you're getting all your paint off every time and scraping. So go ahead and do that and go ahead and mix up your colors and then we'll jump in. You've got everything taped up here and you're going to go ahead and just start filling these shapes with your different colors. I'm going to take my blue here and I'm going to fill this shape with my blue. Again, a nice big flat brush here is going to help you lay down your color a lot faster. Initially, acrylics can go on kind of shear. You don't want to paint it too thick or gloopy because you'll end up with really obvious brush marks. If that's what you're going for, that's fine. You can even mix in some modeling paste or texturing medium in with your paint, and that'll make those brushstrokes stand up even more and you get kind of a textured element to it, which could be fun. But that's not what I'm going for here. I'm just going to make these nice and smooth. You can even add a little bit of water to your acrylics if you want that slightly more washy feel. Before I wash my brush off, I'm going to pick one more shape here that I'm going to make this real true blue. I'm just going to add that color in, fill in that shape, making sure to get real close to the edges. I'm going to wash my brush off, and I'm going to switch colors. There's no real rhyme or reason to, I need exactly as many orange shapes as I need blue shapes, it's whatever feels pleasing to you. You could even create an ambery of fact in these shapes with your different colored paints if you wanted to go from orange all the way up to the lightest tint to veer orange within one shape. That could be really pretty and again, starts to hit that little bit of an analogous color scheme. We're just going to fill in the shape here, and I'm going to pick one more. I really want my true colors here with that bright value and intensity. Remember those words that we learned earlier, I want that intensity and just a couple shapes. I really want those shapes to stand out in this. Then I'm going to fill the rest of my tints because they're a little bit lighter, they're going to recede to the eye a little bit. I think those are the only ones I'm going to do with my blue and my orange. The nice thing is acrylic dries really fast, so I'm looking at this and I feel like my blue was a little splotchy is a little uneven. Now that I've done that, I'm going to go back and just throw a really quick second coat on that because that first coat should already be pretty much dry. It might not be quite there, but it should be dry enough that you can throw a second coat on it. I'm just doing that so my colors read a little more uniform and a little more flat, acrylic because it's plastic base is going to be inherently waterproof and it's going to be a little more glossy and shiny because it's got more of that acrylic, that plastic material in it. Now that I've added what are my boldest colors here, those most intense colors, I'm going to go ahead and start adding in my tints and shapes. I'm going to go with my next lightest orange here, and I'm going to pick a shape and fill it in. You'll see I just added some white to this, it's all I did, I worked with my base orange and lighten it up a little bit to make it a tint of that orange and it starts to go to almost a more coral color there that's really pretty. Filled in that one, and I'm going to fill in maybe this one. Just fill and make sure you all the way to the edges of your washi tape there, so you get nice clean edges when you pull the tape off. I'm going to wash my pressure off. Make sure you're really getting all the paint off your brush and between because if you go from orange to blue because they're complements of each other, you could start to get that muddy brown color in the middle. I'm going to go to my nice mid blue here, and I mixed up nice big puddles of paint when I started, just so that I wouldn't have to worry about running out of paint or going back and mixing more paint while I was working. Acrylic does have a pretty fast dry time, so you might find if you mix a big blob of paint and let it sit too long that it might get a little bit of a skin on the top of it. That's okay, you can usually just kind of lift that away with your brush and the wet paint underneath will still be totally workable. If you also find maybe you've got acrylics that are a little bit older or they're starting to feel a little stiff, you can add a little bit of water to your paint to make those little more workable. You can also add things like gel medium or a gloss medium, and those will change the texture of your paints. Some of them will change how long it takes to dry and give you a little more workability there. So those are all nice tools to have in your toolbox. I'm going to go to my lightest tint of blue here, which is a really nice sky blue color, and I think I'm going to do this one. For the most part I'm trying to make sure I'm looking at what edges are shared here because you want the color to be able to play next to each other, so I'm trying not to group too many blues together, too many oranges, to make sure that each shape is at least sharing one side with its compliment so you really get to see that complimentary color scheme in action. I'm going to fill in the last of my shapes here with my lightest orange, which is this really lovely peachy shade here, a tint, I should say. Remember tints are when you add white and shades are when you add black, and tones are when you add gray. So they're going to become a little more muted by adding that white and that black may seem counter-intuitive, but it'll take down the intensity and again, make this a little more muted, a little softer. They're definitely really lovely when you're looking for a less saturated feel, and I can't wait to see what you guys do if you post in your projects, let me know what color schemes you're loving. What are you struggling with? What are your questions? I'll definitely jump in the comments with you guys. I'd love to talk about the projects you're working on, and these are just fun, easy projects. You can do these with your kids or your family, which is great. Acrylic is great because you can get the washable temporary paint that is great for kids because they can finger paint with it and it washes out of things, but it is really easy to work with for projects. You can take these same color theory principles you're learning and apply them all over the place. You can use them in watercolor, illustration and graphic design, and your home decor. I have a very, like I said, complimentary color scheme in my office. I've got a lot of light blue and coral, so this is going to go really nice in there in that space. Just give everything just a minute to dry and then we'll pull our tape off and you can see your final product. 6. Color Theory 101, Project 1, Step 2: Now that our piece has dried, we can pull the tape off. This is always my favorite part. I think it's just oddly satisfying. But just grab your tape and start gently pulling it away from your paper. You should have nice clean edges where your paint caught up to it, those last little bits off there. There you go. You have a fun model abstract composition in your color palette. You can put it in a frame, put it on your fridge, hang it on your office. The nice thing with this campus paper, it's fairly stiff, so it's going to stand up on its own. But it's up to you what would you do with it. But I hope you had fun creating it and enjoy your project. 7. Color Theory 101: Project 2, Step 1: Project number two is fun because it doesn't require a ton of precision and it's got some dimension to it, which I always love. For this one, you're going to be putting your paint onto a piece of paper just enough to get yourself some shapes that you can cut out of it. Go ahead and mix your colors. I'm going with an analogous color scheme on the sun so I've already mixed my colors. I've got blue, and blue violet and violet here. I went ahead, I'm doing tones of these this time, so I've added my white to each one and then a little bit of black so that I get that gray. You'll see that each one feels a little more muted, a little less richly saturated or pigmented. The white brings him up a little lighter again giving me that analogous color scheme as you see three colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. Looking at these in comparison, you'll see these are the tones of my blue and my blue violet and my violet here. Not a lot of rhyme or reason to this, I'm just for the sake of ease, I'm going to take that same washy tape that we used in project one, and I'm going to tape my sheet into three sections. I could do thirds across. I'm going to do something to me that's easier to lay out a bunch of circles then afterwards, so they did about a third across one way and then still technically thirds, I'm going to divide that other one in half. I don't really care so much if I've got a little bit of hangover here, because we're going to cut shapes out of these big swatches of color afterwards. Really easy, just go ahead and with each of your colors, you can use one or two, or three or four. Whatever color scheme you're using, just go ahead and start filling each field with your color. You may have to mix larger puddles of color for this, I definitely would recommend, start with more color at the beginning, because if you're mixing custom colors, it is going to be a challenge to get that exact same mix partway through your project. If you have extra paint left, you can always put a little bit of Saran wrap over it at the end of your projects to get in a fridge helps keep it from drying out and use that again in another project within the next 24-48 hours. You cannot keep forever, but you can definitely keep it for a few days. If you have an air-tight container to put it in, that helps a lot too. But just anything to help keep it from drying out. Again, you don't have to take your paper off for this, as you can see, I'm not being super precise about where I'm laying my color down again because I'm going to punch shapes out of this. Wash your brush off, and I'm going to rotate my page to make this as a little easier. I'll take my next color and just fill in my next big block here. For this one, it's fun if I can see my brushstrokes, because when these come down to smaller shapes, that adds a little bit of visual interest and texture. But again, do what feels right for your project. The nice thing is acrylics, especially heavy body, if I were to leave that shape, their just huddled up on the canvas. It wouldn't flatten out much as it dried, it would really hold that shape and hold that texture which makes it a lot of fun to play with when you want to add texture to your paintings or illustrations, and it doesn't really matter if all my brush strokes go in the same direction. You might even want to mix the direction your brushstrokes go in if you do want them to show again, that gives it some texture and visual interest to your piece. When you're working with these, I'd recommend getting as close to a natural light source as you can. I'm sitting under the window in my studio right now, and so daylight is going to make these colors really read as true as possible. Day light bulb is okay, a fairly cool light is going to simulate daylight. If you start to work under a really warm light that does have a yellow cast to it, and you may find it affects how true your paint colors are that you're mixing. Something that may feel very much like a certain color when you get it out and natural light, you going to have wished you'd added more yellow to it, because the light was tricking you into thinking it was more yellow than it was or your colors might start to get a little muddy. Definitely recommend whether you've got a task lamp or your overhead light or whatever light situation you're working in, try and get that as close to natural light as you can so that you get the truest rendering possible of the colors that you're working with. Just about got this unfilled in here, got some, pretty rich, obvious brush strokes here so that you can see those, and we cut our shapes out and do a little color collage. That's good enough for that, so I'm going to let that dry for a minute, and then if you've got your circle template or something round to trace, or I'm going to use a circle punch like for scrapbooking to make things easier, go ahead and get one of those, and if you've got your foam core, go ahead and grab that and we'll go ahead and prep our next step while we wait for this to dry. 8. Color Theory 101: Project 2, Step 2: I've just got a piece of standard foam core here, a quarter-inch thick, and I'm just going to go ahead and cut some small pieces off of this. These don't need to be precise, their sole purpose is to stand your shapes up off your page for the next step of our collage here. I cut one strip here, and these probably look really ugly but again, that's fine. You're not going to see them all in your next step. I've got my piece here and I'm just going to cut into some little squares. As you can see, it's a little wildly, I might try and spring off in for directions a finger underneath to give it a little bit of stabilization will help those just stuff fall right into place. I'll just go ahead and cut a pile of these that we'll have enough to work with in your next step. There's no exact number or science to this. One of the things you may see is that your scissors kind of smash that. Just go through and maybe fluff those edges up a little bit again and try and get them to be is an even little stands as possible. 9. Color Theory 101: Project 2, Step 3: So now that our big color blocks have dried, go ahead and pull your tape off. If you've got a circle template, or a bottle cap, or even your washy tape roll, go ahead and trace out four or five half a dozen circles in each. I'm going to use a shadow box frame. I'd recommend something that does have some depth to it, because what we're going to do is create these little cut-out circles of our paint colors, and pin mount those up on our little blocks of foam core here, so that they stand off the back of our canvas here. Go ahead. I've got a circle punch, if you happen to do scrapbooking or something like that, and you have that, it's definitely going to make your life easier. I'm going to cut apart my shapes here so that I can get up close to the edge with my punch. You can just trace your shapes with a light pencil mark around on your car box here. You can even do it on the back so that you can see them and that you don't have to worry about them showing up, then you can cut those out with scissors, that works fine too. Just for speed's sake, I'm going to go ahead and cut, for my frame here, I figured out I couldn't fit 15 of these circles, so I'm going to cut out five of each color. You can save these if you want to do more afterwards, or do a different color. That way, you've already got some pre-painted pieces there. I've got my little shapes here, some of them you can see the brush strokes on. I've got five of that color, I'm going to do five of this one. You've got the texture in that one, and then I'm going to do five of my last one here. I've got my five of each color, and I move my frame out of the way. I think the easiest way to do this is go ahead and lay those paints site-down. You've got your little foam core squares. I use tacky glue just because I think it's easy, but you can use Elmer's glue, I find Elmer's glue sometimes a little bit runny. I'm just going to go ahead and put a dot of Turkey glue on the back of each circle here. I've got that glue down, and I'm just going to stick a piece of foam core. That means I'm going to make sure they're stood up on each side, they are not too crushed from my scissors. If you have a utility knife, or an exact tune knife, that can be another good way to cut these shapes out of your foam core without crushing the edges, the way your scissors can sometimes do. That will ensure that each piece stands up the same height around each side. Just go ahead and put your foam core on each of your however many pieces, I have 15 pieces. You don't have to do circles if you've got a square punch, or a star, or a triangle, or you want to draw some unique shapes, go crazy, do whatever feels fun for you. Maybe, you've got a room you want to put this in that you've got a certain shape that you want to echo. I like circles because I think they're very organic, but go wild, get creative, do whatever shape you like to do. Make sure you're posting pictures of this and the projects, we want to see each other's work, and I want to see what you guys came up with, and what you're doing with your art work. If you're taking the color lessons you've learned, applying those elsewhere, we'd love to learn about that too. The other nice thing about tacky glue is it doesn't dry super fast. You'll see on our next step, it gives us a little bit of workability and time to move things around and get them just how we like. So because I'm doing an analogous color scheme, I really want these to feel like ambre, so I'm going to turn my frame, and going to line up rows of each of these. I'm going to put a dot of glue on the back of each of these, and as we mentioned before, tacky glue doesn't dry super fast, so I can go ahead and put glue on all of these and have plenty of time to work with these before they dry. Just go ahead and put a dot of glue on the back of each of your circles here. Like I said, I've got my analogous color scheme, so I want my rows of colors, till it feels like an Ambre. I can look at these and see, I've got one of my blue violets here, and then my true violet, those are really looking pretty close together as they've dried, which is another good thing to test your paints before they dry. If I had given those a little more time, they probably would've looked a little different. Paints may dry a little different than what they look like on your palette. I'm going to look at my different shapes here. I'm going to do, because mine look so similar, I'm going to put my blue in the middle. I'm going to do my rove blue through the middle here. You can put as much or as little white space between these as you want. I'm working in the space of my frame because I wanted to be sure exactly of how much space I had to work with with this mat. If I'd done this just on my piece of canvas, not in the frame, I might have gone too big or too small. All you have to do is take your piece of glass out, that's also going to make your work easier to photograph, which is important if you want to post it on Facebook or again, share with us here on skill share. That's just a great photography tip in general, if you're ever trying to photograph a piece of framed art, take the glass out and you'll get rid of that glare. What you'll see with this is it creates this really nice dimensional effect of, I'm getting a little bit of shadows cast from these. It makes it almost a little bit sculptural, my pieces here that have some whitespace showing, and a little bit of those brush strokes that starts to add some visual interests there too. You can certainly play with that effect. Just before you take this vertical, I'd really give it six or seven hours to sit and dry, because that's tacky glue, like I said, is going to take some time to really set up. Really fun, easy and, expensive way to get this fun little piece of dimensional art work, and then put the glasses in and, you can see it's got these fun shadows here and that dimensional light play. That's our second of two projects for you to learn about color. I hope that you've learned something about how color works, and maybe you're a little less scared to work with color now. You've learned about your color schemes, and how colors play together, and what happens when you mix white, or black, or tense, and tones, and shades. I hope that you're willing to go out and adventure more with color and that you enjoy creating these projects. Thanks so much for taking this class with me and I look forward to teaching you guys more about color and art in future classes.