Tip 2 Collages are excellent for expressing your emotional color preferances.

If you do not have old paintings that have become a little boring, make colors just for the sake of it to be cut up for arranging and rearranging. I have learned that I hate most of the red pieces but love themnext to their compliment. I love the yellows but have relatively few of them. They are more difficult to manage in paintings without them popping.

My watercolor paintings going back ten or more years are a source for my play. My play is sorting the colors and textures into piles of color harmonies each pile having a dominate color. I have a pile of each of these blues, greens, yellows, reds, salmon oranges, whites, metalics, blacks, and neutrals. Within the color piles there are hints of every other color all in harmony because of their similar dominate hue. I have compressed the piles into zip lock bages and stored them on shelves. I feel like with paper I can weave and quilt using little pieces from c paintings that have sentimental memories. I get inspiration from just looking at these color bags. I have a quantity of greens from mostly Oregon landscapes, Salmon from Utah landscapes, reds from abstracts, yellows also from abstracts and flowers. Blacks from gesso I purchased to encourage a student about 20 years ago who liked black. From the same period I did abstracts with purples. The amazing thing is no matter how worked over a painting is, breaking it up into small pieces, each and every piece can be places in an awesome harmonious new home.