color shifting

While back East visiting my family, we all decided to go for a walk and find a new place to eat.  Stonington borough is a beautiful, quaint town in Connecticut, close to the border of Rhode Island with old cape houses with gardens that line narrow, meandering streets.  Taken by this beautiful cornflower blue house as we walked by, I remembered I hadn't been practicing my color shifting lately.

  One skill an artist should always work on is their inherent feel and understanding of color.  When mixing pigment on your palette, one should try and become the color, absorb yourself into it, feel the richness of it or its quiet shade so that you know where it wants to be on the canvas.  This will help your process flow naturally.

 I'll walk you through the steps of color shifting and I hope you find this will remarkably improve your color sensitivity as you create.

1. Stand in as close proximity to the color you would like to shift into. You may find articles of your clothing start shifting right away.  This is normal.

2. Close your eyes and envision the color, how it feels (cool, warm, intense, weak, kinetic, still...).  It is important not to overthink it.

3. Envision yourself as that color.  Your skin, hair, toenails, everything must shift to this new color.  When you are ready, slowly walk away from the color you have been standing next to, holding the vision of yourself as this color in your mind.

note: It is best to walk away from the color at first in order to strengthen your independent color nature.  Eventually this will not be necessary and you may be able to eliminate step 3.  ALso, it is helpful to have a buddy* so they can critique how accurate your shifting is.  You may find that you shift a few shades too light at first.  This is natural.

4. Shift!

*I was lucky enough to have Corby there to get a picture of me.  This was my first time color AND shape shifting.  When I realized the color shifting was happening quite easily ,  I decided to try and take it one step further and became a hose.  Sometimes you never know what you might become so it's a little risky.  You can see me in the last picture there.  But that's a very advanced state of shifting.

To unshift just simply think of another color radically different and you will pop right back to normal.  The more you practice the stronger your color sense becomes.

Have fun!