Color Theory Workshop with Lynne Fearman

Lynne Fearman led a wonderful oil painting workshop on color theory.  Armed with a red, a yellow and a blue, our first exercise was to see how many colors we could make out of the basic triad of "primary" colors.  What a range of  blues, greens, oranges, purples, browns etc showed up on our worksheets.  After trying our different versions of the primary colors to observe the variations, we mixed "black" from the triads, and created a grey scale by adding white. Following exercises focused on value as we painted a cube (under a spotlight) using the greys,  checking via our grey scale view finder to be sure the values were correct for the cube sides, the shadows and background.  Later we painted an apple in grey, and then colors, again to check our values throughout the process.  Our final exercise was to paint a landscape, first in grey scale, and then in various mixes of our primary triads. Lynne really encouraged us to mix up the paint, try different combinations, check and recheck the values

A few of the attendees were not oil painters, but wanted to try the medium.  It was a challenge for them but also fun to look at painting from a different starting point.  Definitely the principles of getting the right value carry over to watercolor and other media.  Lynne provided the tools - little cubes in various colors and values, the view finder, spot lights and even paints or brushes as needed - so that we had everything on hand to direct our attention to learning the importance of value and better color mixes to improve our painting outcomes.