Lately I’ve been revisiting an old idea of one of my favorite teachers, Gretchen. Her approach to teaching “color” was to present us with a still life each week. The trick was: each still life included just one color. But, oh, how many shades every color has!
I spent many years doing colored pencil and pastel drawings of her still lifes, always picking simple compositions, then making the color as wildly complex as possible.
What I learned from Gretchen: you can use every color in the box for any color you care to draw.
I’m back to one-color still lifes again, this time in paint. I’ve been working on orange. Next: red.
Joanne Taeuffer 