Designing With Color

Tips for Designing with Color

Learn a simple way to use the principles of design to combine colors in a way that makes your paintings pop!

Does Choosing a Color Scheme Feel Confusing and Complicated?

Analogous, Split-Complementary, Monochromatic, High Key, Triadic, Quadratic, Low Chroma...

Are your eyes glazing over? Mine too.

Color Should Be Fun!

It's not a secret I love color wheels (I've made dozens), but there are ways to choose colors for your paintings without having to remember all twelve variations of a triad. (Are there twelve? It feels like there must be.)

By using the simple principles of harmony, contrast, and expression, we can easily understand the way colors interact with each other, and choose color pairings that look effortlessly beautiful.

In This Recorded Class You'll Learn:

The principles behind how color schemes are usually taught, and how to quickly use them to select a color palette for your painting.

My favorite go-to color schemes and palettes that are easy to mix and make for beautiful combinations every time.

Color combination tips like:

How to use contrast to draw the eye
Why harmony is so important
Why you don't need 100's of colors to make a vibrant and interesting painting

Class Format

1-hour recording of a live online class, with a combination of teaching demonstrations including a slideshow presentation and two live painting demonstrations

Course Lessons

Introduction & 3 Simple Principles of Design
How to take all of the design concepts and organize them into a simple triangle
Ways to Think About & Organize Color
A peek into the three main building blocks of color, three ways to group color, and two easy color schemes
Using Design & Color to Analyze a Painting
Walking through all of the decisions I made in a painting that make it seem complex when the roadmap is actually extremely simple
Painting Demonstration 1: How the Design Principles Work Abstractly
Demonstrating how to move through the triangle of design using an abstract painting as an example
Painting Demonstration 2: Using Color & Design to Compose a Flower Painting
Composing and laying out a painting using the triangle of design, and showing how to use it to solve problems along the way

Also Includes

Downloadable Workbook with tips on design, the principles of color, and several project sheets to walk you through everything from composition to self-critique

Bonus eBook: The Color Fixing Flow Chart to help you evaluate your color mixtures and fix them before they go awry

What Students Are Saying:

"Excellent presentation. The concepts are clearly defined, very instructive!"

- Ruth M

"You are such a natural teacher! I loved it!"

- Alexa V

Class Cost: $35

Purchase Now!

Class FAQs

Is this course only for oil painters?

Not at all! I demonstrate in oils and in the workbook list my favorite oil colors, but everything I teach in this course can be translated to any medium.

Because this course is more about how to think about and combine colors rather than how to mix them, it would be useful for everyone from a painter to a mosaicist to even a graphic designer!

Is this a course in composition?

Kind of... Becuase we only have an hour together in this course, I really dialed in the focus on just how color relates to the triangle of design. This means we really don't get to shape, line, pattern, etc.

But, you can start with color and then apply the concepts to everything else from there!

What experience level is this course for?

I've designed this course so that no matter what level you're at, you'll likely find something that clicks with you and really changes the way you look at color.

We have to hear things several times before they sink in - myself included! - which means that you might watch this course as a beginner and be blown away by complementary palettes, or watch it as an advanced painter and find an entirely new challenge in using limited palettes.

Hello! I'm Whitney Hall (aka The Curious Painter)

I've been a full-time painter since 2008 and have been teaching painting and color theory for just as long!

My favorite thing is helping painters of all levels overcome whatever is frustrating them in the studio so they can find more joy at their easels.

I'm also a total color theory nerd. I love researching everything I can learn about color theory and color psychology and color science, and finding a way to explain it in the simplest way possible.

I live in Bozeman, Montana with my blue heeler. When I'm not painting or teaching, you'll probably find me gardening or exploring somewhere in nature.