To understand many of the puzzles that comprise the making of art, you must understand color. To help in this endeavor, you can buy a "color wheel," an inexpensive cardboard or plastic item like a child's toy, which shows graphically and with tactile, spatial reference points the mathematical theory of relationships between hues. Or you can try to understand color the way my mother taught me. Or both. They complement each other, actually.

From my earliest childhood, my mother took me almost daily to the ocean. She taught me to see colors at all by teaching me first to see all the colors in our little portion of the Pacific.

Blue was always obvious, in the water and the sky, dark and bright or greyish and mysterious.

So first, we would look first for the violet as both shadows and highlights of the huge expanse of overwhelming blues. Violet is blue's child and neighbor on the color wheel.

Then we hunted yellow, violet's opposite on the color wheel. Where violet was usually found in dark places, like a shadow, yellow, its opposite, was usually bright. Usually we found it shining in spattered golden or silvery light through the sky or across the top of the water.

Next came green, yellow's child and neighbor. We would find it as plants growing beneath the water, or in flecks of light skimming just below and above the surface, kind of as a suggestion, the way greens appear in mother-of-pearl. But sometimes the waves themselves were a pure glassy green, like a bottle or like jade.

Then we'd search for green's opposite, red, any shade, even vaguely pink in tiny particles of that same irridescence that showed us the green.

Finally we sought out the orange, or peach, or cognac, the Vedic color of life, the opposite of the blues we first saw, and child and neighbor of the reds. Except during a flaming sunset, reds and oranges were the hardest to find in the ocean off of Southern California, with red the very hardest to detect; so once we knew where the red was, the orange was easy.

And this brought us back to blue, the opposite of orange. And now that we'd seen the other colors, we saw the blue better, too, so much richer and deeper.

For years, from my babyhood until long after I started elementary school, we would go to the water and she would repeat this recitation. To be quite honest, through all of my earliest memories, all I ever remember seeing in the ocean were shades of grey and blue. I thought my mother was just imagining things or making stuff up to tease me. But after some years -- maybe eight or ten? -- it all came together, all the relationships and oppositions and applications of shadow and brightness, and then the vision was deeper than before. And then this became an automatic exercise for us, a ritual of sorts, soothing for me because all the colors were always there now that I knew how to look for them, even on gunmetal Baja-storm-weather days.

And now when I paint or draw anything, this is the exercise I go through looking at my subject, my reference shots, the images in my mind: "Where are all the colors? Let's start with violet..."

Try this at home -- by yourself, with a child or children, or with a friend... Starting with blue as a reference point, the most obvious to the most subtle, search out the violet in your landscape, and then progress through the other colors, bearing in mind their relationships (opposites, children) and the things you expect to show them to you (water, plants, light itself). Once you've identified something in an obvious place, keep looking and see where else it appears. For example, you may notice that violet appears in the shadows of a yellow flower, that in fact the shadows are not pure black or grey or brown, but maybe blue, probably at least tinged with violet. You may notice yellow appearing on a blue flower as a highlight which you had assumed was just a lighter blue. In my mother's color theory, opposites attract, and parents are never far from their children.

Please do let me know what happens. Don't worry; I won't expect to hear from anybody this year. If you're starting from a state of zero knowledge about color -- and believe me, you're not; you'll be surprised how much you really know once you start thinking about this -- you should probably expect this to take time, lots of time, before you can really own this process and its implications. And this might not be the right order for you, either, and it still wouldn't hurt to buy a color wheel. But take it easy, and go where it takes you, visually and mentally. Remember, the biggest part of an artist's job is simply looking.

You can use any environmental feature of good size, but be sure to go at different times of day and in different kinds of weather. You can use any expanse of land or body of water, mountain snow or desert sand, or even a large tree in your front yard, as long as you vary the conditions in which you look. (This, by the way, is sort of why Monet painted the same haystacks or the same cathedral many, many times; he was exercising his eyes as well as his hand.)

Even if you don't learn a single thing about color from this exercise, or whatever exercises you develop for yourself from this, you will enhance your time outdoors and the way you observe your surroundings by studying them from this systematic but unusual perspective.

Above all, always, have fun!

Would you like to try another exercise? Try jigsaw puzzles.
Psst -- Fontaholics: Like the font in the title? It's called "Avian," and it came bundled with a Sierra product.