Color Harmony in Painting with Patricia Savage

Please note: this class meets Saturday, October 12, 10 am–4 pm, and Sunday, October 13, 10 am–2 pm.

This class delves into how colors relate to one another in a painting for visual and emotional impact. Understanding the characteristics of color—hue, temperature, value, and chroma—gives you a framework to successfully construct a painting. As you practice capturing the characteristics of color and that becomes engrained in your painting, you become better able to create an emotional effect driven by color.

The class includes instructor demonstrations with students receiving plenty of individual instruction. It is not a class on how to paint but a study of using color. Students need to be comfortable with a particular medium. This class is open to all artists regardless of what technique or medium they use.

Day 1: Students work with Josef Albers’s system of “interaction of color,” painting small exercises to examine how colors interact with each other, in contrast and harmony. Participants work in the color palette of their choice. The instructor works with each student to explore what color characteristics and combinations suit the painting they will be executing from their own supplied image(s).

Day 2: Students apply what they learned on day 1 to their own painting. We will not expect a finished painting; we will concentrate on color studies to enhance it. Students are encouraged to think about how they could choose a color palette to create the desired emotion in the viewer.

Image: Courtesy of Patricia Savage