Observe

"This studio habit of mind slows you down and puts you in touch with your five senses," says Wolfston. Combining her lessons on color theory into a single activity, Wolfston asked each of her students to create 100 colors with an artist's palette of just the basics: yellow, red, blue, black, and white. For her class, this meant paying attention to the ratios of paint needed to express specific colors and color values.

"If you learn to observe more in life, it just gets richer what you start seeing, what you start knowing," Wolfston says.