10/01/2026
Students in Frank Sullivan’s Watercolor course (ART 285) have been learning about color harmony and color schemes. Color harmony involves working with variations within a limited range of colors to create visual unity—much like a songwriter or composer uses notes from a particular key or chord progression to establish harmony in music.
Students have explored a variety of color schemes, including monochromatic, analogous, complementary, split-complementary, and triadic. As an exercise, they created paintings using only a pair of complementary colors. Working within this limited palette, students used color subjectively while exploring ways to create three-dimensional form, organize a composition, and establish mood through mixtures of their two chosen colors, while controlling saturation, temperature, and value.
