PAINTING COLOUR

Painting Colour is an intensive, hands-on workshop to increase your understanding of how to create paintings with increased depth, density, movement and brilliance. With examples from Classical and Contemporary Art History, and a healthy dose of fun, we learn important painting techniques alongside colour theories, to provide practical methods of negotiating our constantly shifting world of colour.

Day One: Theories and Practice

“When I’m painting, I need to think in terms of paint” Claude Monet. Today, we journey through the histories of colour theory from Ancient Greece to the 21st Century, to understand how our perception of colour continually evolves. However, to work properly, these theories require an understanding of the materiality of paint, so we uncover the physical properties of our colours to create depth and density in our painting.

Day Two: Intuition and Problem Solving

“I don’t start with a colour order, but find colours as I go” Helen Frankenthaler. Intuition is a powerful approach for developing your own colour language, yet requires trust in yourself and strategies for finding a way through when lost in a painting. We explore the psychological properties of colour so we can be authentic in our colour choices, always with an eye on the previous day’s lessons to allow us to work through the inevitable problems of painting.

Day Three: Colour Space

“Sometimes white comes forward, sometimes it goes back, it just depends” Paul Klee. Colours occupy specific pictorial space in relation to the other colours around them. By playing with the different kinds of contrasts, we can shift space forward and back in our painting, creating distance, movement, and stronger composition. Together with the lessons learned, we will now have a broad and deep understanding of how to use colour in painting.