Making color: Pictorial art training for environmental color design

The current experience refers to a workshop I held at the university, which for the first time organized a workshop about color and about environmental color design. It is important to educate students to color analysis. The aim of the course was to work on colors in the environment: students had to gather chromatic information on urban spaces, proving their ability to see and identify colors linked both to nature, landscapes, and street furniture. To this end, an exercise I had designed entitled “Let’s Invent Colors ” proved to be very useful. Each student created his own palette not according Itten’s system of “subjective colors ” but with the creative attitude of a painter or the scientific attitude of a researcher who must trace back the color composition formula after making “his own ” color. The above exercise was enthusiastically performed by approximately 70 students. The outcome of this course was shown in March 2004 during the exhibition “Experience in Color, between Expression and Design ” promoted by the Councilor for Urban Quality of the Municipality of Genoa and b