The key to colour 

Allison, this is an amazingly eye opening video; after years of painting and art school decades ago, you have managed to present one of the most important and often neglected aspect of color in an extremely clear and understandable, and fun, way. I enjoy all your videos and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all your work and so generously sharing it. ❤️☀️❤️

Interesting there are so few comments and views on this video. Everyone wants to know more about color and it is usually the most difficult aspect of art to start to understand for new would be artists. Yet you present the most important basics of it in this simple, succinct video. As someone who has recently immersed myself for the past few months on everything I could get my hands on about understanding color as it applies to art, I have learned enough to appreciate that this exercise is probably one of the most useful, fundamental exercises someone could undertake to understand color and how to apply it to art. When I first began my art education journey I wanted to paint pictures but found it a total mystery how great artists could come up with the colors they used in beautiful paintings. And colors that harmonized. Yet early on I would never have appreciated the value of this type of basic exercise you presented. I think this type of exercise along with creating paintings with a three color limited palette are the most important thing a new artist could do to start to understand color. For example take three values of one dark color-say burnt umber-and make your picture. Or use charcoal. If you can’t create the forms with monotone don’t even bother with color until you can. Then once you creat you picture in monotone, take two colors or three colors of paint of that fit into the complement or say split compliment theory of the color wheel. Add white and possibly black and you cannot help but have a harmonious picture if you duplicate the values of your monotone using those three colors. And take into account with those three colors that cools, grays, sharp edges, and less value contrast recede and warm, more saturated, sharpe edges, and greater contrasts advance and you have all that you need to paint beautiful paintings. It is such a simple concept but something so few art instructors and books teach in a straight forward way. I spent years knocking my head against the wall with respect to the color aspect of these basics. Your instruction is some of the absolute beat I’ve seen. I only wish I had a mentor like you several decades ago.

Thank you for great inspiration! 💛💙

Such a helpful exercise!

I am not an artist but I enjoy learning the different elements, and how artists work with them. This video helps me understand a more of why colours work together. I never realised that what makes a colour the "neutral" is that they come from the mixing of the primaries, so unites the paint colours..Very interesting. Thanks for the demo.

LOVE this learning style

This video is amazing Alison. I cant believe after decades of painting that you have come along and taught me so much about understanding how colour works. This video should be presented to all students at the beginning of their art journey. I totally agree with JC who's comment is below, so no need for me to say more, except thank you so much for your generosity and time to help understand different aspects of art........Alioban

Sooooo useful, thank you. As well as collage will be helpful to decide on colour palette and mixes to use before committing paintbrush to paper for say a landscape. Your videos are great.

Además de presentar con tanta claridad la teoría de los colores, es que lo has hecho de forma muy bonita. Me ha gustado.

Alison, I love your videos and how you explain color in this video. Very informative. Question: Since you are using computer paper to create the color swatches, what are you using to adhere the collage pieces to the substrate? Are you using a gel medium of some kind or a glue stick? How do you keep the pieces from buckling as the computer paper is quite thin. Thanks so much.

Alison is there an other way of letting you view my work other than Facebook.I am loving your videos,thank you.

So interesting and informative - please could you give me a definition of what you mean by a “neutral” colour? I’m not entirely sure what you mean by that term. Thank you so much for your help 😊

do you use the wax paper that you mix on in collages?

you teach in the south of france?! thats where i am. how do i sign up?

This was a demo I did for one of my recent Free Play Date classes

How do we get your emails? I love your video's and would love not to have to search for them, sounds like an email would solve that. Thanks!