Do you ever feel boxed in by your references or limited to what you can set up in your space or find in a photo? Do you admire another artist’s color magic and wish you could bring a little of that into your own work? Maybe you’re itching to combine multiple inspirations but worry about whether it will all come together. It's not about the paints you have on your palette, it's what you do with them!
In this transformative 4 day workshop, we’ll explore how to use our references as a jumping off point. Instead of copying exactly what you see, you’ll practice bending reality through quick iterations of thumbnails and color studies. Each exercise will challenge you to reimagine your subject by shifting color schemes, playing with value ranges, and pushing atmosphere to create new moods and vibes.
Along the way, you’ll discover how a single reference can spark endless variations, and how your creative choices shape the story your painting tells. This course is all about building confidence in your own vision, learning to trust your instincts, and having fun with the “what ifs” of painting. By the end, you’ll have a whole toolkit of approaches for turning any reference into something uniquely your own.
PLEASE SEE PREREQUISITES BELOW
Day 1: Kickoff & Creative Analysis
We’ll kick things off by breaking down a selection of paintings to uncover the choices artists make in color, value, and composition. Together, we’ll ask: Why does this work? What makes it dynamic? We’ll also revisit key tools from Level One before diving into exercises that reimagine a single reference through multiple value interpretations.
Day 2: The Power of Limitations
With a limited palette, you’ll discover the freedom that comes from constraint. By focusing on interpretation rather than exact matches, you’ll see how our individual decisions make all the difference.
Days 3: Ride the Wave
Here’s where things get fun. Choose an inspirational painting or image that captures a mood you love and “catch the vibe” by applying it to your reference. What happens when you take a landscape palette and use it in a portrait? Or borrow the atmosphere of an industrial scene for a still life?
Days 4: Full Color Finale
Bringing it all together, you’ll take a neutral (black-and-white) reference and create a full color study, drawing on one or more palettes explored earlier in the week. This final project is your chance to fuse experimentation with intuition and see your references come alive in unexpected ways.
Prerequisite:
Completion of Color Bootcamp: Basic Training (Level 1) is required. If you haven’t taken the in-person workshop, you can either attend it in person (the next one is in January 2026) or purchase the recorded webinar and complete it beforehand. Participants must have a foundational understanding of color mixing, including Hue, Value, and Chroma. This workshop will not cover basic color principles or how to do a color study.
Color me inspired!
