It’s time to put your color knowledge to practice with some assignments! You’ll be painting a monochromatic sphere, then repainting admired artworks using complementary, split complementary, and double split complementary palettes.

Let’s take a look at how using a double split complementary palette can help simplify color choices to ensure a cohesive, colorful painting without being overwhelmed by too many hues. First decide on the light source's temperature and its complementary shadow color. Choose two colors for light and two for shadow. Then block in local colors and shadows, ensuring color harmony throughout. Use blending modes and soft edges to integrate colors smoothly, and refine details like ambient occlusion and highlights.

Learn how to enhance your digital paintings with a split complementary palette. In this demo, you’ll learn how to generate line drawings from existing studies, the concept of splitting complementary colors into neighboring hues, practical tips for organizing layers, and step-by-step guidance on applying and blending these colors.

A complementary palette uses opposite colors on the color wheel, like yellow and purple, for dynamic paintings.This demo will show you how to do a complementary palette color study from start to finish. Starting with a sketch, picking your complementary colors, and building your painting by exploring different saturation and value levels.

Now that we understand color temperature, light, and shadow, let's apply this to painting using different palettes. We'll start with a simple sphere, using a monochromatic palette to explore warm and cool variations within a single hue.

On an overcast day, the sky acts as a giant diffuser, scattering light from all directions, resulting in a cooler, desaturated light. This diffuse light softens shadows and flips the color temperature seen in sunlight, making lit areas cooler and shadows warmer. By sampling colors from photos, Marco Bucci shows how ambient light affects local colors, pulling them towards cooler hues.

In this color theory lesson by Marco Bucci, Marco shows you how to improve color temperature in your paintings by understanding the interaction between warm and cool hues under different lighting conditions. He uses practical examples and direct color sampling to show how light and shadow affect color perception. Key techniques like the "bully" light principle and the use of saturation are discussed to help you create cohesive and visually appealing artworks.

In this lesson, Marco Bucci explains how light dictates color temperatures.

In this lesson, Marco Bucci walks us through the concept of color temperature using examples from one of his favorite painters.

Watercolor and white gouache are great for quick outdoor sketches, capturing basic color and light relationships. In this demo, I demonstrate how I use a Strathmore craft paper sketchbook and a simple watercolor palette to paint.