Learning to See: What Painting Has Taught Me About Colour

I used to think I understood colour. I had studied art at college, at foundational level and also took a degree based design course. Entering the professional world my designs were never questioned for my use of colour so I thought I must of been ok. That was until one day when presenting a piece of work, a peer at the time absolutely bulldozed into me about my lack of understanding of colour. That day 15ish years ago hit hard and it still does. It’s not recently many years later that I have a bit of time to look at honing my use of colour.

Staring at a screen for many years using colour screen is one thing. Colour mixed on a palette, responding to the light in a room, sitting next to another colour that changes how you perceive it – that’s something else entirely. My artwork has become the place where I’m slowly, sometimes frustratingly, learning to really see colour. This is where I see myself learning about colours.

One of the biggest shifts has been learning that colour is relational. A yellow next to grey looks completely different from the same yellow next to purple. Value, how light or dark a colour is, often matters more than the hue itself. And temperature, whether a colour leans warm or cool, changes the whole mood of a piece before I’ve even settled on what I’m painting.

I’ve also learned to slow down. Mixing the exact shade I’m after usually takes several attempts, and most of what I’ve learned has come from getting it wrong: a muddy mix, a colour that fights with everything around it, a painting that just doesn’t sit right until I figure out why. Each mistake has taught me something a colour wheel never could.

The strange thing is, this has changed how I see the world outside the studio too. I notice the blue-grey of shadows on a wall, the way autumn light shifts everything warmer, colours I would have walked past a few years ago. That’s the part I didn’t expect: that learning to paint colour would change how I actually see.

This blog will be where I share more of that process: the experiments, the mistakes, and what I’m learning along the way. Thanks for reading the first one.