COLOR LAB #6: Seasonal Challenge — The “One Tube of Paint” Study

One color. No escape hatch. Absolute creative freedom. We know that sounds like a paradox. Stay with us.

Welcome back to Color Lab, where we voluntarily make art harder in ways that secretly make it better. This month we’re doing something that sounds like a punishment but is actually a superpower: we’re taking away all your colors except one.

That’s right. One tube. One glorious, terrifying, endlessly fascinating tube of paint. You’re going to use it to make a complete piece of art, and by the end you’re going to understand that pigment (and value itself) better than you ever have before.

“But I need more colors,” you say. No you don’t. Not right now. Right now you need this color. And we’re going to prove it.

This is the One Tube Challenge. Let’s get into it.

(Brand new to Color Lab? Our Foundational Post explains everything. The rest of us will be here, deeply invested in a single tube of Raw Umber.)

Why One Tube? (The Part Where We Convince You This Is Actually Brilliant)

Here’s a thing artists often discover after years of practice: value does more work than color. A painting with correct light and dark relationships but slightly off colors will read beautifully. A painting with gorgeous color but confused values will look flat, muddy, or just… wrong. Somehow wrong. You won’t know why, but it’ll bug you.

Monochrome studies exist specifically to train your eye to see value, to stop getting distracted by “should this be more orange or more green?” and start asking “should this be lighter or darker?”

Also, listen. We’ve all done it. You hit a rough patch in a painting, and instead of solving the actual problem, you introduce another color. And another. And then suddenly your thoughtful still life has seventeen colors in it and you have no idea what happened. Working with one tube removes that escape hatch entirely.

Decision fatigue? Gone. You made all your color decisions in the art supply store when you picked the tube. The rest is just painting.

Your brain learns things when you take away its usual crutches. Forced creativity is still creativity.

You will discover things about your chosen pigment that you’d never notice while it’s jostling for attention in a full palette. How it dilutes. How it layers. What it does when it’s barely there. What it does when it’s really there.

One tube. So much information.

Picking Your Tube

Any single-pigment color works. But the color you choose will define the mood of your entire study, so choose with some intention.

Classic, time-tested choices (for good reason):

• Burnt Sienna or Raw Umber: warm, earthy, forgiving. The classic monochrome choice for a reason. Makes everything feel ancient and beautiful.
• Payne’s Grey: cool, moody, cinematic. Basically invents atmosphere out of nowhere.
• Ultramarine Blue: rich, slightly granulating in watercolor, leans warm for a blue. Creates very dramatic studies.

Unexpected choices for the adventurous:

• Quinacridone Rose: warm pinks to almost-white, with a range that surprises you. Very different emotional register.
• Sap Green: forces you to think about what green shadows mean. Weird and wonderful.
• Yellow Ochre: warm and sunny, harder to get dark enough, which teaches you a whole lesson about value range.
• Transparent Red Oxide: hello, Color Lab #5! Gloriously transparent, builds luminous darks, and absolutely phenomenal for this exercise.

The rule: One tube. That’s it. You can use white to create tints (acrylics, gouache, oils), or water for dilution (watercolor). You cannot introduce another color to “fix” things. That’s the deal.

Step One: Make Your Value Chart (Don’t Skip This)

We know. Charts feel like homework. But hear us out: your value chart is your map. Without it, you’re navigating the painting blind.

In watercolor: Paint swatches from almost-clear water (barely a whisper of pigment) to full saturated strength. At least seven distinct steps. Watch how the color changes character at different concentrations — some pigments go from almost-nothing to richly saturated in a startlingly short range. That’s information.

In acrylics, gouache, or oils: Mix your color with progressive amounts of white for your lighter values, and use it straight (or darker if possible) for your darks. Build a strip from near-white to full-intensity.

Pin your value chart next to your work surface. Refer to it constantly. Every time you’re about to mix a value, look at the chart and ask: “where does this sit on my scale?”

This is the most important piece of the whole exercise. The painting is the application. The chart is the education.

Step Two: Make the Study (The Actually Fun Part)

Pick a subject. Paint it. With your one color.

What to paint:

• A simple still life — mug, fruit, draped cloth, anything with clear light hitting it
• A self-portrait (brutal, effective, impossible to fake your way through)
• A window view or landscape (atmospheric perspective with one color = genuinely beautiful)
• Something from imagination (shapes, forms, made-up spaces)
• Mimic a master painting in monochrome (turns out Rembrandt values are still Rembrandt values in Burnt Sienna)

The subject is just a vehicle. The real work is seeing where your lights and darks need to be, and then mixing exactly that value with your one color.

As you work, notice:

• How different the same color looks when layered over itself
• Where you’re tempted to reach for another color (that’s your brain trying to escape, don’t let it)
• How much you can suggest without fully rendering
• The moment when the piece suddenly starts reading correctly (this moment is extremely satisfying)

The Big Nerd Explanation (Why This Has Worked For Centuries)

Monochrome study has been a foundational teaching tool since, essentially, forever. Old master ateliers did this. Academic painting programs do this. Observational drawing classes do this. The consistency across centuries and methods isn’t coincidence, it’s proof that isolating value as a skill produces real, measurable improvement in artists at every level.

When you remove color as a variable, your brain stops trying to solve color problems. All that cognitive space goes to composition, edges, value relationships, and mark-making. Four skills improving simultaneously because you constrained one variable. That is excellent value (pun intended, always intended).

Once you can control value, color becomes the finishing layer. You’re not guessing anymore. You’re making choices.

That’s the jump from “I hope this works” to “I know this works.” This exercise is a direct path to that jump.

Come Pick Your Tube

We have every color in the universe, in every medium you paint in. Come in, tell us you’re doing the One Tube Challenge, and we’ll help you pick a color based on what you want to learn, what mood you’re chasing, or honestly just what color you’ve always been curious about.

We’ll also set you up with the right paper, walk you through value-mixing technique, and enthusiastically derail you into a twenty-minute conversation about iron oxide pigments if you let us.

Pick your tube. Make your chart. Discover what limitations can teach you.

We promise you’ll never look at a single color the same way again.

Ready to pick your one tube and find out what it’s really capable of? Come in. We’ll help you choose, set you up, and send you home with everything you need to make some genuinely beautiful, deeply educational monochrome studies. Have a completed monochrome challenge? Tag us on Instagram and share!