Understanding brilliance: In a series of digital and physical preliminaries, and digital and physical final compositions, students explore color brilliance by arranging hues adjacent to each other in a manner that emphasizes a distinct contrast in value.

Understanding temperature: Students explore temperature by creating a series of digital and physical preliminaries and digital and physical final compositions that explore the transition of hot to cold. Instead of having a distinct difference with adjacent colors, students are asked to transition the temperature of their work with colors that are similar or equal in brilliance.

Experiencing successive contrast: Students explore the power of a color's environment and seek to make a hue appear changed depending on the colors surrounding it. They select six colors that a continuous color will be placed in the center and eventually develop this concept by creating a final, free form composition with their continuous hue repeating throughout the composition. Colors in the final composition will be the same colors as the preliminary.

Complementary Contrast: Students successfully identify complementary pairs that are light-dark in contrast. If a pair of complements is not naturally light-dark in contrast, students adjust the colors by adding black to create shades or white to create tints. They will create a series of digital and physical preliminaries and digital and physical finals. In addition to exploring complementary contrast, students will also explore texture by either creating actual texture in their work or simulating texture.

The Power of One: Students will dilute a single color and create four-color scales in a physical preliminary and final painting that demonstrates how the saturation of a color is affected by adding white, black, gray, and its compliment. Their final image will be monochromatic and show contrast by manipulating a one color’s saturation. Their goal is to have a lot of the middle, mixed colors, and very little of the original colors in your final painting.

Space and Depth: Students seek to demonstrate the illusion of spatial depth with color. The final image will demonstrate the concept of spatial dept (Spatial Effects) through the Contrast of Saturation concept applied to a perceptual landscape painting. Students will draw the landscape from perception and value gradation as a preliminary exercise in preparation for their final work.

The Shape of Things: By constructing a series of free-form designs, students apply Itten’s principle, in which he assigns a color to shapes and forms. They create five painted exploratory constructions, which are especially interesting as their shapes evolve or morph into another form—this allows the color to change as the shape changes.

Balance and Proportion: Compositions are arrived at by balancing colors' lightness or brightness of hues. Our projects follow the numerical system assigned to colors influenced by Goethe and prescribed by Itten and apply fractions to break down the color balance numerically. Our compositions are small and intense, and we examine the application of contrast of extension in the cultural context of popular animated films and theater productions.

Color harmony is the development of themes from systematic color relationships that serve as a basis for a composition. Select balanced color schemes according to where they exist on the color wheel and the geometric shape they create based on position (dyads, triads, tetrads, hexads, etc. Create a preliminary that explore this harmonious phenomenon and then select one of the color schemes from the initial exercise to create a final composition. Students will assign metaphoric or symbolic content to the colors used in the final composition.