From BlenderWiki
Diffuse shading (Material general color)
One of the easiest things to do is to setup the general color of the material.
Just below the preview tab you should see a Material tab with settings for the color.
- LMB
click the swatch of the COL button to bring up a color picker.
Here you can drag across the color panels to select any color you like. Try it.
LMB 
a color then confirm it by pressing the ↵ Enter KEY.
The material will now have a diffuse color based on your choice. You are also able to manipulate the R G B sliders directly in the material tab or to enter values to accurately obtain the color you require.
That is what I want you to do now. LMB on the R value so that it changes color for direct numerical input.
- Enter 1.0 for R(ed) and press ⇆ Tab to move down to the G(reen) entry.
- Enter 0.837 and press ⇆ Tab to move down to B(lue) entry.
- Enter 0.438.
NOTE:
Numeric entry and using the TAB KEY to move between entry points is a useful technique to learn in Blender. There are many other dialogs that use this method.
|
I selected that color after very careful observation of the desk in front of me. If we were to render now this is what we would see.
- F12 to render
SAVE YOUR WORK REGULARLY
When you are working on any creative process involving computers it’s a good idea to regularly save your work. It’s also a good policy to make incremental saves of your work so that if you want to return to a previous save you can do so. Fortunately Blender has a great incremental save feature.
- From the File menu select Save As
- On the Numeric Keypad press +
The filename will be appended by a number or incremented if it already has one at the end of its filename. Since the initial blend file you downloaded was called desktop-01.blend it will be updated to desktop-02.blend.
- Press ↵ Enter to confirm the save.
Do this regularly to save yourself heartache.
Specular Shading (Shininess of a material)
