Color: From Boring to Brilliant! | Instructor, Patti Mollica ©Patti Mollica

Exercise 4: Colorful Coffee Cups in Color Schemes*

The goal of this exercise is to use the color wheel to pick the colors and color schemes you want to work in, and explore how colors relate to each other based on their positions on the wheel.

This assignment can be painted on an 18x24” canvasboard to accomdate 12 paintings. The measurements below are for 18x24”.  Draw a grid, lightly, on your canvasboard. Use the 5”x5” reference for the coffee cup image and the guideline below. 12 squares will fit on 18x24 size.

Click here to get coffee cup PHOTO and tracing image

There is a coffee cup “tracing image” you can use. With a scissors, cut out this image and trace (or draw freehand) onto your canvas. An easy way to trace is to apply charcoal or pastel to the back of the image.  Then place the image down on top of each box on the canvasboard and draw on top of the outlines with a pen or pencil. It will leave a faint image on your canvas (like using carbon paper).

In each one of the boxes, paint the coffee cup in these 12 color different schemes going from left to right - in the order they are listed below. I.e. Monochromatic is in top left box, Analogous is in next box to the right, then complimenary, etc.

Monochromatic  Analogous    Complimentary     Triad    

Tetrad     Split complementary    Analogous Comp   All Neutral    

Neutral & Saturated    All Saturated    High Key    Anything Goes

Click to see the 12 Color Schemes and their descriptions

You do NOT have to work in the 3 primaries from the chart exercise unless you want to. In other words, feel free to use your entire palette of colors. You can use whichever color schemes you choose. I.e. your complementary colors can be violet/yellow, or orange/blue, etc. Your triad can be red, yellow blue,  or red-orange/Blue violet/ yellow-green. etc. They must be based on the color wheel. Remember, you can use all the tints, shades and tone colors of the hues you are working in.  

Its OK if some other colors enter into your painting that aren’t exactly part of your color scheme - as long as they don’t compete or dominate the colors that are actually part of the scheme. Make sure the overall main colors are those you chose for a scheme.