Hey everyone! In today’s Quick Tip Tuesday, I’m sharing a set of color tests inspired by my three-year-old grandson, Elliot.
If you ask my three-year-old grandson Elliot what his favorite colors are, he’ll tell you “red and pink and blue” — in that exact order, every single time.
For his last birthday, he and his mom requested three prints using those colors.
Simple enough… except that I have multiple reds, multiple pinks, and multiple blues in the studio.
So instead of guessing, I ran color tests.
I created three different versions using red, pink, and blue — changing both the specific paints and the order in which they were layered. As you can see, the results were surprisingly different.
This is a simple but powerful exercise to try when:
- you’re aiming for a specific visual effect
- you’re unsure how one color will behave over another
- you want to better understand the paints you already own
Opacity plays a huge role here. Some blues are transparent, some are opaque, and many fall somewhere in between. Even paints labeled “semi-opaque” can behave very differently depending on the brand, pigment load, or how thinly they’re applied.
For these tests, I kept things intentionally simple:
- small plate
- thin layers of paint
- minimal concern for composition
- basic stencil shapes just to track color interaction
The goal of the tests wasn’t to make finished artwork — it was to understand how the colors behave together.
It’s a quick experiment, but an incredibly useful one.
If you haven’t tried this approach before, give it a go. The results may surprise you.
Once I understood how these combinations behaved, choosing Elliot’s final palette became much easier.
Sometimes a few small tests can save you a lot of second-guessing later.
Exploring how colors interact in layers is something I spend a lot of time teaching and studying.
If this kind of experimentation interests you, you might enjoy the approach I share inside Pandora’s Palette.
Have you tried running color tests before starting a project? I’d love to hear how you approach it.
Have a colorful day!
Diana 💕
It always fascinates me how much difference the order of your paint colours makes.
With so many different versions of his favorite colors, how could I not do some color layering tests? 😉