In this exercise, you will learn to use together a few interesting colors: medium blue, white, crimson, and dark goldenrod.

You will need these 4 colors, 3 types of brushes (one wider and two narrowers), and a canvas.

This will be a 4 step exercise:

1. With your widest brush, take a white color and make a long horizontal line.

2. On top of this white color with the help of your middle brush create a little shorter narrower horizontal medium blue line. This should be done in a way so that you could still see the white above, below and on the right side of your medium blue.

3. With your narrowest brush, on the lower left of your white line, create a crimson line. The length of this line could be about 1/3 of the full length of the white line.

4. From the right side of the crimson line, create a figure similar to italicised letter T with a goldenrod color. As you can see from the above picture, this figure could be touching your medium blue line from below and laying on top of the white.

NOTE: Although you can see a few more colors used in this fragment, the point of this exercise was to create something interesting out of medium blue, white, crimson, and dark goldenrod. Of course, feel free to further experiment with these 4 colors if you want to expand your painting.

If the painting in its entirety is grey, adding small patches, lines or points of other colors creates an interesting emotion. It is almost as if we can add any kind of color next to grey as long as we can find it in various places strategically throughout the painting.

Note that the mode of the grey painting does not necessarilly have to be such that the grey color should be monolitic. Instead such painting can have many smaller or larger patches of grey which from the distance creates an illusion of homogenous color.

Dark brown in the grey painting can become quite prominent and focused with the addition of the yellow color just as seen in this figure of the tree (top left).

When a center figure has most of the focus, it's very useful to take its color and distribute it accross various parts of the painting. This is seen in the above work.

Orange looks good next to green (in the center), next to dark brown (below and above). Even small points of orange are powerful next to grey or blue (on the left).

It doesn't really matter what color is next to orange as long as there are a few places of orange and it looks not incidental but created on purpose.

The white color in the dark painting can be very effective. Often it is even vital to create contrast.

Remove the white color patch in the upper center and this blue will almost be invisible. The white gives it light and the ability to shine.

With the help of the white we can also appreciate orange, red and light blue much better. It sort of directs all our attention and focus to the area in the center where pointed orange is repeated in the top area of this painting.

Interestingly, this white patch in the center corresponds to the white figure in the bottom. Even white point to the right of this figure is much more vivid because of this larger center area.