Sometimes, I like to start with color as the main inspiration for a painting, I might take my palette, mix three or four colors that I think are great, and then make a painting from that. In this case, I actually went to the paint store and found for paint chips that I liked. I found a red, a green, dark purple, and a creamy white. It's kind of fun to see all those rows of color chips, color paint chips and pick out your favorite one. Then I went back to my studio, and I mixed these exact colors. And here they are.

I took jars and I matched each one. And the way I did it is described in my one video from this part of this series. I go much more into depth about how to match colors exactly, but I brought my swatches that I used from that video. To show you and here is the red paint swatch the exact same one that I found in the paint store. Another benefit of using paint chips from paint stores is that they have multiples of the same color. And I started with this red, and then I kept changing it until I matched it exactly.

And the red when it's matched exactly, just blends right into the paint chip, you could barely see it. And then I swatched the top and so the paint is inside. And the swatch on the top is a little different color than when the paint is wet, so it helps to have it dry on the top. Let's look at the green one here. Here's the green paint chip. And here was the series of color mixing steps that I went through.

I started here and I went all the way to here and you can see that the final color is so close that it almost again disappears into that paint swatch. The same with the purple. Here's the purple swatch. I started over here with a bright purple. And it took me a while, I got all the way over here to match this purple. Same with the cream colored could barely see it.

So here are my matched colors. And now I'm ready to make a painting with these colors. But the key to making a painting using favorite colors, is to use the opposites of these colors in addition to these colors in your painting. Let me explain. In my book create perfect paintings. I talked about the use of opposites.

A lot. If you have something bright in your painting, by adding something dull, you bring more attention to the bright pairs of opposites are very important in paintings. So if I look at these colors, what do I mean by opposites? Well, the first thing we think about if you've ever studied color, is that the the word opposites can also mean the word complement. So if those of you that are used to a color wheel, any color that's opposite the other on a color wheel is its complement OR its opposite. Let's look there's only three pairs of complimentary colors.

So if we look at Green here, its complement OR it's opposite on the color wheel is red. Here's one pair of opposites and the next pair would be a yellow. with purple, again purple and yellow are opposite each other on the color wheel. This purple is so dark because it's a modern color. Just going to add a little bit of white to it so you could as a visual clue that it is a purple there and then last pair of complimentary colors is blue. Again, this is a modern color as well the fellow blue with add just a little bit of white To bring out the flavor of the color, so we remember it's blue, otherwise it looks black.

And the opposite of blue is orange. This is a mineral color, so it doesn't need to be popped or adding white to look at its true color. Here's our three different pairs of complimentary colors green, red, yellow, purple, blue, orange, those are what we normally think of when we talk about opposites in color. What I'd like to do is expand or broaden this concept of opposites, and say, well, in addition to these complimentary pairs, we also have light and dark and dull and bright. So if I look at the colors that I picked, here's a green while the opposite is red, but it's also kind of dull. Another opposite for this would be a bright green.

Here's a red The opposite is green. But it's a bright red. We could make a dull red, a dark red, a light red, if you remember right in the beginning, we started working with families of color, so to make a painting that I think would be much more powerful than just making a painting with these four colors, is to take each color and make as many opposites the concept of opposites as we can. So for instance, let's just take this red here, here's red, we have the opposite green, the normal idea of opposite, but now let's think about making this red darker. Here's a darker red or adding black to the red. And we could take the same red and we could add white to it to make it lighter.

Just another way of making a palette or an arrangement of colors, that once we spend the time to make mixing the colors, then we have them to utilize in our painting quickly, because it's I think it's, it's often easier to just mix a lot of paint first, and then add it into your painting and keep painting and mixing and painting and mixing. But so we could do the same thing with each one of these colors, we could take the color and use its complimentary opposite, but we could also make a darker and lighter version, a brighter and $1 version, and even a warmer and a cooler version. So here's the painting that I made using these four colors, along with a grouping of the opposites, a broader scope of opposites of each color. And let's compare the painting to these four colors. So you can see the red is here.

The green is here, purples here, and the cream color. But I've got these sets of opposites. So the purple has a bright purple doll here and it has a bright orange here. And so this pops forward, and the red and the green move forward and back. This bright pink comes forward from this neutral gray. opposites are what create that sense of space, some colors come forward and some go backwards when you have pairs of opposites.

And I mentioned earlier that by concept of painting is that I'm trying to create some kind of experience some kind of sense of space, the use of opposites is what helps the most. So try this yourself. Go to the paint store, find a few colors that you like, and then spend time mixing them exactly. That'll give you practice in matching and mixing colors. And then, on your palette, add some additional mixtures and broaden that scope of opposites not just the compliments, but adding light, dark Warm, cool, bright and dull versions of those colors and see what happens when you start using all of those in your painting.