- I'm going to leave you with one more
paint related project idea.
This project involves painting a portrait
of your favorite coffee mug
or your favorite tea cup, and you're going to use
the five colors of paint
that we've talked about in this course.
Primary Cyan, Primary Magenta, Primary Yellow,
and Black and White,
and any other painting supplies that you need.
Why this project?
Well, for starters is because most everyone
has a favorite coffee mug, or a favorite tea cup, right?
More importantly, this is a project
that will bring together all the color theory
and color ideas that we've been talking about
throughout this course.
By the way, this project, it should be fun too,
and if at any point it starts feeling
like something other than fun,
you're probably not following my instructions closely enough
so let me show you how this thing works.
First, set up a space to paint.
Then, choose your coffee mug or your tea cup,
put it in place, and sketch it out.
Be sure to use and accept whatever drawing skills you have,
I mean, if photo realism is out of reach for you
then go semi-abstract, or your version of impressionistic
that's totally fine.
Next, paint the whole thing with grays.
Mix up maybe six values of gray
and work on shading your drawing
with flat panels of these grays until you're happy
with the values in your composition.
Feel free to liven things up artistically too,
I mean, paint in some imaginary patterns,
dots or textures to add visual interest.
Work on your gray scale painting until its value structure
looks clear, strong, and nicely thought out.
Once you get there, let the paint dry.
From here on out, the only so called rule
is to replace your grays with colors of the same value.
I mean, you've already done the hard part here,
you've worked out a good, strong
value structure for your painting
now, simply replace your grays with colors
of the same value, use whatever colors you want.
Be sure to explore different levels of saturation
for your colors, and use the CMY Color Wheel
that comes with this video to help you figure out
how certain colors are mixed.
There is literally no end to the different colors
that can be blended using the primaries of cyan,
magenta, and yellow, along with black and white.
Also, let the color wheel let you find a color's complement
like if you wanted a complement to a color
to either mute it, or to create a brown or a gray,
I should mention too, that artists who mostly work digitally
like most of us, will quickly be reminded
that there is no undo command
with real world media like this,
just know that every mistake you make
every time you waste paint or you have to redo something
or if you just plain blow it,
you've just learned something about paints and painting.
Every time, maybe it's something you never want to repeat
or just as likely or more likely,
you just learned something that could come in handy
another time, so go easy on yourself.
We've just learned a whole bunch
about values and colors here,
and the ways of paint, and by the way,
I did that whole project on a Sunday morning,
I had music playing, I had a couple cups of coffee,
there were no clients, no deadline, no expectations,
other than to learn something about paints and color
and to have a good time, and I hope that
you will approach this in a similar way,
because I think we learn the most
when we allow ourselves to enjoy the art that we do.