Munsell Colour Workshops in Belfast

April 2019 Munsell Colour Workshop

Dates: April 8 – 12th 2019

Venue: Belfast Academy of Realist Art

Cost: £600 (Around USD $775, depending on conversion rate when you pay)

Accommodation is not included. Belfast is a great place to stay with plenty of air B&B’s etc.

If you’re interested, please click the link below and Julie and I will contact you with more details. Places are limited so don’t wait too long!

Click here to register

It’s a surprising approach to colour. It seems almost scientific at first.

And I think that when people first come across it, it throws them a little. Because we’re so used to thinking about colour in very vague and mostly emotional terms.

So when someone starts to wonder what colour things really are, and wants to try to translate those colours into paint, this vagueness obscures something that is, in fact, rather straight forward – if only we can find our way through the fog.

Colour isn’t hard

If you’re a realist painter – by which I mean work which reflects the visual phenomena of our world for at least part of its meaning and effect – then understanding colour is paramount.

It’s also the area of representational painting that people struggle with most.

For me, this is where Munsell, and the specific way I’ve learned to apply it, can find a straight and clear path through the confusing melange that we’ve been taught.

The most immediate problems of colour that I see people struggling with are these:

Mixing colour
Replicating the colours you see
Using colour to show form

These things are what I consider to be the foundation of good colour. They must be understood. Not just theoretically, but practically, on the palette.

They stopped being serious problems for me a long time ago. I don’t mean to sound superior. I struggled with them just as much as everyone else at the start.

But as soon as I started using Munsell, together with a simple but effective way of accurately judging the colours I saw, I knew I’d found a way to solve the biggest colour problems that were holding me back.

Gently evangelical

These words were recently used about me by one of the attendees of a workshop on colour I gave in Belfast at the end of last August.

And it’s true, I am evangelical about it. Because using Munsell has not only solved my own most pressing difficulties with colour, I’ve seen it do the same for the people I’ve taught.

So what is it? Why is it so effective?

It’s basically, at its heart, a way to practice getting colour right.

If you continually practice getting something wrong, you just get very good at getting it wrong.

What Munsell does is give us a way to practice getting it right. And when you add an effective feedback mechanism that lets you check your results objectively, you’ve got a really effective way to learn.

Colour workshop in Belfast

Last August, I gave a two day colour workshop in Belfast at BARA (the Belfast Academy of Realist Art run by Julie Douglas).

On the first day, we covered an effective method for approaching mixing called bracketing, that gives you complete control over your mix. We also covered how to match any colour with complete accuracy.

On the second day, we went into the studio space and painted cubes and spheres with one aim in mind – getting the colours absolutely right.

It was quite thrilling for me to watch the attendees hitting colours exactly, often being amazed at doing so, and then going straight to using those colours in painting.

A five day workshop in April

The one thing I regretted is that the workshop was only two days. There is more to cover, and some things could have been gone into in more detail.

So next April, we’ll be running the workshop again. This time it will be for five days.

What will you learn?

It will completely revolutionise your approach to colour. It will start you on a path which will help you surmount all the most common colour difficulties.

What I promise to give you is a method and the tools you need to you can go away and practice colour effectively on your own.

A method that will allow you to:

Mix colour reliably and without frustration
Replicate the colours you see exactly
Use colour to show form effectively

I want to give you a method, instead of recipes because ultimately, that will teach you more about colour than watching a hundred painting demos.

Unless you know what’s going through an artist’s head as they paint, unless you’re party to the years of practice and trial and error they’ve put in to learn what they know, you won’t get the results they do no matter how often you watch them paint.

Because good colour is about knowledge, understanding and skill. My colour workshops are designed to give you what need to be able to develop them on your own.

April 2019 workshop details