How can I learn about Colour?

Often my beginner learners don’t consider taking the time to learn about colour.  They think the colours come from the tubes of paint, so what is there to learn?

Quite a bit, colour is such an important part of painting that it shouldn’t be ignored. Not only will you learn how to get the colours you want if you learn colour mixing but also how colour influences artwork.

I set these tasks for all my beginner painters:

• The Colour Wheel – get a copy of one and stick it in your sketchpad, it will teach you so much about colour.

 

• Colour mixing – using only the three primary colours (red, blue and yellow) mix as many colours as you can.  Then mix the secondary colours with the primary colours to make tertiary colours and see what you get.

•  Colour relationships – paint squares of colours inside one another and see how they look, this is a good way to decide what a background colour should be in a study.  You will learn by these studies which colours blend, which colours come to the foreground or ‘jump out’ at you and which colours recede into the background.

Also see my post What are Colour Relationships? or more advice.