Explore Colour in a Sketchbook

All artists are explorers. We explore how we can make the world. Make it better.Prettier. Funnier. More interesting. Nicer. More colorful.

A great adventure awaits in colours, if you just take time to see them. Really look. If you want to learn about colours you should get yourself a small notebook or sketchbook and start to collect around one colour family. You can choose any colour. I choose my favorite color (pink) for this first book.

Then you start collecting materials with different surfaces: snippets of yarn, scraps of fabric and paper. Glue, staple or tape them into your sketchbook. Then rummage through your art supplies and find some paint to mix. Paint swatches. Doodle, draw and experiment around “your” colour to explore it further…

Ask yourself questions! How many hues can you paint? What other colours goes with it? How do you feel about it? Where do you see it? What do you you notice? What words come up when you look at it?

Take notes. Explore the colour. Have fun!

I made my little sketchbook but you can pick up any notebook and use for your colour explorations.

The cover of my sketchbook is a white mate board. It is cut for framing but was not straight enough for selling in the shop. I made a few of these notebooks a few years ago when I got the unused passepartout. I love the little window in the middle.

Now this one has found its purpose: it’s a sketchbook for exploring color. One specific color: pink.

I let a lot of stuff stick out from the edges and hung pink beads and funny yarns from the spine. I love how it looks on the shelf. You just want to pull it down and look through it.

In her colour school Julia Caprara writes:

A personal colour book is something that you could spend an intensive week working on – or the rest of your life – slowly adding more and more colours to the pages as you find them.

I was inspired to start my Pink Sketchbook by Julia Caprara and her beautiful colour theory and embroidery book Exploring colour that I reviewed a while back. I hope you’re inspired too!