This weekend I enjoyed taking a workshop on intuitive color painting at the Miller School of Art in Greenbridge, Seattle. I especially liked the artist's color wheel showing the different recommended pigments and where they are represented on the wheel in relation to each other. I did notice that there were some colors missing - perhaps there are no pigments in shades of lurid yellow-green or clear rhododendron red.

We did one exercise using only black, white, yellow, and burnt sienna oil paints. The black stood in for blue, and the burnt sienna for red. This combination works especially well for replicating art from the 16th to 18th centuries, I think, and for portraits and maybe figures, too.

In another exercise, we selected a color harmony scheme and a fragment of a "famous" painting for reference. I find that colors blend and behave very differently when using oil paints in comparison with acrylics. You can easily achieve more muted tones, for example.

Here are some color thought experiment exercises, based on other classes that I have taken and some that I just made up, using only:

Black and white paint 

A chromatic color and white

Ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, and white 

Black, red, and white

Complementary colors such as green/red, blue/orange, and purple/yellow, but one of the two colors must be dominant

Bright colors on a black background

The same bright colors on a white background and on a grey background

Non-standard ways to mix colors, such as cadmium-hue orange and bright blue to create green, yellow and black to create green

Mix secondary colors, such as green/orange, orange/purple, and purple/green and see what colors are created from various proportions

A variety of colors, but mix a bit of yellow or white into each one to create a color "look"

Colors that you try to match from a paint company color selection (like you might find at a big-box store)

When you're done, evaluate which combinations you think work best and which were the worst, according to your personal sense of color.