Over the past 6 months, I’ve been learning a lot about color. I’ve been taking classes from Dick Nelson, a watercolor painter and digital artist who studied with the famous colorist, Josef Albers, at Yale. Expanding on Albers’ teachings, Dick has created a series of experiential lessons in which students discover for themselves just how relative our perception of color is.

Relative? Isn’t red, red? No, how we perceive a color depends on what other colors are around it, how bright the light is, the color of the light, and individual characteristics. What we call red could look like orange, brown, or gray. I’ll show some examples later.

Because my mission is to make ideas visible, I plan to summarize my learnings in a series of blog posts. This will also help cement the concepts for myself.