It is the next morning, and I've slowed it down a bit. I started with an outline sketch...  My sketch is a bit taller than the original picture, but I'm okay with that. On to the color, eh? Let's start with the pepper itself.  When I first looked at it, I wondered if I had a red bright enough to paint this. I mean, that looks like a brilliant red. But on closer inspection, other colors began to come out. It's not really a true red; it's more of a rich pink. There's a bit of white in it. And there is yellow and purple in the highlights. To confirm it, I loaded it into Microsoft Photo Editor and zoomed in. Check this out.  You see the yellow and the purple? And then I color-matched the reddest pixel in this close-up and its RGB value is red-255, green-29, blue-21. The green and the blue make a white shade when combined with the red, so this is like 8 1/2 parts red and 1 part white. Also, at this close view, you forget that it's a red pepper. I believe that anyone could paint that little swatch and be fairly accurate. Why? Because it's no longer a red pepper. It's now just colors: reddish-pink, yellow, purple, and white. Paint a bunch of little swatches like this and it's - ta-da - a painting of a red pepper and a sliced onion. It's hard work to unlearn. It's also critical to learn how to do this. The Creating Passionate Users blog has a very succinct post on this. Yes, we're under pressure to learn more and to learn quickly, but the future goes to those who can unlearn faster than the rest, because you can't always learn something new until you first let go of something else. And learning to let go of rules is one of the first things we (and our managers) have to learn to be quicker at.Sometimes that means letting go of something that served you well for a long time. They point to smart guy, John Seely Brown. Go read it.All of this is a good reason why today's schools don't teach what people need to know - especially MBA colleges. Jack Welch said, "I am convinced that if the rate of change inside an organization is less than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight." The same could be said of us. I think seeing truly and unlearning are two of the greatest skills in life. | 
