Review: Painting With Color: A Contemporary Approach with Joseph Dolderer (Craftsy)

Painting With Color: A Contemporary Approach is a Craftsy tutorial course by Joseph Dolder, a wonderful painter who's also a teacher at the Philadelphia art institute.

This 7-lesson course is a beginner's guide to studying colours with oil painting. The course focuses on how you can see and think about colours, mix and apply them to your own paintings.

The lessons are pretty straightforward and easy to follow along. They start off simple by painting coloured boxes lit by light. You get to practice colour matching and mixing. It moves on to adding details in the colour shapes. By using simple subjects like boxes, you're forced to focus on learning to see and mix the colours. It's actually quite challenging even for simple subjects like boxes.

The lessons shows you the process from start to finish and the explanations are very easy to understand.

The later lessons move on to painting rounded objects. The goal is to help you understand form and plane changes, to see how light affects colours with the change in plane or when the form of the object turns. The last few lessons talk about more complicated subjects with multiple planes and on how you can tackle such subjects, how to handle the colours, light and shadow.

This is a very hands-on and informative course on the fundamentals of colour mixing with oil painting. I would recommend this to oil painting beginners.

Painting With Color: A Contemporary Approach is available for sale on Craftsy. You can check out more reviews there, as well as the description of all the lessons.