• Special message: Have you browsed our Academy recently? One of my favorite ways to relax is to sit on my porch during the summer and watch what the light is doing as the sun is setting. My porch is facing east, so as the sun is setting, its light rays are coming from behind me, causing them to shoot perpendicular to the tree trunks and portions of the foliage turned in that direction. LOCAL COLOR CHANGES IN FRONT OF MY EYES I watch the greens of the foliage... There are times when those greens turn totally dark orangish red like the foliage in these palms. If the palm in the colorful sunset dropped one of its leaflets, and if I picked it up and turned my back on the sunset while looking at it, it would be green again, but in the atmosphere of that momentary light, it takes on the color of the light.
TURN IT INTO A COLOR MIXING CHALLANGE A fun exercise is to have my paints ready to go and before light color changes, pinpoint an area in the foliage and mix the color I see, then paint a splotch of the mixture. Then when the color of the light begins to change, mix the color for that and make another splotch. If I continue this until I can no longer see any color, I will have learned how to observe the color I see, rather than guess what it might
be. Give this process a try. It will revolutionize your observing skills for color! Enjoy a delightful weekend! During my Language of Painting series, I explained the role of our visual elements. If you'd like to review those roles to better understand the behavior of elements, here are the links to each of those
discussions: Color --Value -- Shape -- Texture -- Size -- Line and Direction
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