Narrrator: Hi, I'm Zia, and my favorite color is green. Do you have a favorite color? The artist Henri Matisse loved bright colors. In his studio, he had 17 different shades of orange!
Matisse had studio assistants help him make his cut-outs. First, they painted sheets of paper in bright colors like these. Then, Matisse would cut shapes from the painted paper. Sometimes the shapes were so big, an assistant would have to hold the paper for him while he cut. He said that when his scissors glided through the paper, it felt like flying.
He also spent a lot of time putting colors next to each other to see how they looked. Sometimes they went together perfectly. And sometimes they didn’t look very good.
Sometimes he would settle on something he liked, and go to bed. Then he’d wake up and change his mind. And he’d start moving the colored shapes around again. He used pins to arrange the pieces and hold them, so he could change things easily. Take a look around this gallery and see if you can find tiny holes in the paper where the pins used to be.