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Artists often say that color is what attracted them to painting in the first place. I also routinely hear them complain that their color is “muddy” or “weak” or “boring”. Why the disconnect?

It seems like there are three main challenges: Seeing color, Mixing colors and Understanding how to use them in a composition.

It took a long time (and much patient instruction) before I started to really see the color and temperature shifts. 

Part of the problem might be that we have no words for the color subtleties. When we look at a face we see areas that have a red cast and some that lean ochre or green, or violet, or gray, but Old Left Brain says, “skin is pink; grass is green; skies are blue. And that’s all you need to know.” So we over-generalize and wonder why our paintings don’t look right.

Just to make matters worse, if we stare at a color, it goes away! Here’s an experiment for you: put a bright red object under a strong light. Stare at it without blinking for 30 seconds than close your eyes and cover them with your hands. What do you see?

In my color workshops, it blows students’ minds to see a blue-green image of the object dancing before their eyes. “Retinal fatigue” produces the complement to whatever color you’re looking at. When the complement merges with  the object, the color grays out.

Here are a couple of helpful ideas:

• Don’t stare. Scan and trust the fleeting impression of color (as in impressionism)
• Get closer. Our ability to see color decreases exponentially with distance. (Lumens measure intensity and decrease as the square of the distance from the light source – including reflective sources)

We improve by the quality of the questions we ask ourselves; here are four:

1. What is the temperature of the light?
2. What value is this color?
3. What temperature is this color?
4. What family is it? (Red, blue etc.)

I’ll provide some additional thoughts in the next blog.