January 2013 – preparing to teach color to watercolorists

I got an email from Jan Shively, a lovely woman in Montana who had seen my work in a Sacramento newspaper telling me if I ever taught weekend workshops, to let her know. She wanted to learn from me. Weekend workshops? Never done that before. So I asked the painters in my groups what they’d like to know, in the way of a special topic. “Color!” was the overwhelming response. Ok, so now I have to figure out what I know about color (hard to separate from my own knowledge and experience) and how to teach it in a way that is super practical, relatively easy and fun. This is the result of many evenings of play in this direction.

I really wanted to keep it out of the technical terminology and theory rhelm – hues, tints, shades, and what means what isn’t all that useful in day-to-day painting. But stuff like whether a pigment is lightfast and how it mixes with other colors is.
Here’s what my palette looked like after making a color mixing panel – Gosh, I love color!