Hands as a palette

The workshop began with a rule: no brushes for the first hour. Everyone chose two colours and painted them onto their own hands, then pressed them onto paper, onto fabric, onto each other.

Blue and orange looked electric on white paper and muddy on skin, where the warmth underneath pulls the blue towards grey. Against a busy patterned cloth the same hand suddenly looked calm. Nobody forgets a lesson like that, because nobody learns it from a chart.