Color Sense

To help you find the color har­monies most nat­ural to you, take a rec­tan­gu­lar sur­face, either can­vas or paper, and divide it into twenty-four equal parts. Now squeeze out a full range of col­ors on your palette. (It is eas­ier to do this in oils, but pas­tels or even poster col­ors will do.) Fill in each square with a color which seems to har­mo­nize with both your wishes and with the other col­ors. The col­ors may be var­i­ous shades of blue, if you have a very decided pref­er­ence for blue to the exclu­sion of other hues. Or they may be fif­teen squares of dif­fer­ent hues, with nine squares of brown, red, or gray. Or they may all be pri­mary colors.

No one can help or guide you in this exer­cise; you must reach down into the inner recesses of your mind’s eye, and record the col­ors you find there. It might be wise to repeat this exer­cise a num­ber of times over a period of weeks, and aver­age out the results. You will be sur­prised how con­stant your choices of col­ors will be, and how unlike any one else’s they are.

Once hav­ing found out which col­ors come nat­u­rally to you, be care­ful about depart­ing too far from these com­bi­na­tions in your paint­ings. This con­sti­tutes your norm, and if you go out­side it you will find that your per­sonal del­i­cate bal­ance of har­monies will be upset, and you will be dis­sat­is­fied with the results.

—Here­ward Lester Cooke, Paint­ing Tech­niques of the Mas­ters, New York: Wat­son Gup­till Pub­li­ca­tions, 1972.

This book is not in print, but worth track­ing down.