Workshop 3: Chen and Rachel

Because one of the women had expressed interest in learning more about color in the previous workshop, we did a color workshop today. I think I was a little too ambitious... see my lesson plan below. I made a handout for the women that reiterated some of the main points to lessen confusion, but there was still a lot of confusion, mostly because color is just a broad and hard concept to understand, and a lot of color examples I would bring in (paintings etc) are much more than one color scheme. Some of the fundamental things I found hard to explain, even things I take for granted. For example, red is a warm color and blue is a cool color, right? Yes, but you can have a "cool" red and a warm red, and sometimes brown can swing either way. It's very hard to grasp.

We started out with an Anne Sexton poem (For my lover, returning to his wife) with a lot of color imagery. I'm not sure this was the best way to do a color workshop, because the women had to shift gears twice: once at the beginning and once at the end of the workshop, when I tied in the poem to the exercise. I do like to have alternatives to just writing or just visual art, so that is part of the reason I put this in there. I also wanted to bring up the emotional value of color, but by the time I had reached the end of the lesson, people's attention had strayed.

Part of the problem is that yes, this is sort of a boring workshop. Color wheel, yadda yadda. It's sort of like teaching grammar. Yet these concepts are the very foundation of what painters use to make pictures, so I thought it was important to convey this.

Finally, I think that just because of the nature of the workshop, you lose a lot of focus from people after the first 20 minutes.

Lessons I learned from this workshop:

Perhaps this needs to be a two part workshop, starting with VALUE and THEN color, because you build off from one to the other.

Have one person sit at the other end of the table in case one group gets cut off from the conversation.

Definitely have free-draw at the end. It's a good release from the info I was throwing at them in the beginning.



Color Workshop


1. Read Sexton’s poem. Keep an eye out for mentions of color. We’ll come back to this later.
2. Color workshop:
- primary colors (medium specific… oil paint, watercolor, acrylic water-based paints you can mix will follow color mixing properties. Not so much dry media, because the colors may turn muddy.)
- Secondary colors and complements
- Color wheel exercise. Also, just experiment with medium.
- Warm / Cool colors (cool recedes, warm comes forward.)
- Color schemes: primary colors, complements, warm/cool colors, or mix thereof
- Examples of what we just talked about. Example of primary color scheme, complementary color scheme, a warm / cool color scheme, and something “complex.”
- Colors in shadows, colors to aid creating dimensionality, space. (ex.)
- Finally, color as emotion and mood. Matisse, etc. Picasso’s cool period.
3. We’ll read the poem again and talk about the moods / meanings color creates
4. Create a piece that uses one thing we’ve learned: Pick one scheme to go with. If you pick a complementary color scheme, remember that you don’t just have to use those two colors, but make sure they are the dominant aspect in your work.
5. Free draw.