The Magical World of Color
(I promise—less theory, more fun!)
When I was first getting started as an artist, color was one of my most challenging subjects (a close second to composition!). That may be good news for you, because I’ve spent a considerable amount of time experimenting with colors to demystify how they sometimes work effortlessly, and other times not so much.
As I became more intimate with the nuances of colors and applied the knowledge to refine my work, I started keeping a color journal, where I’d quickly articulate my reasons for color choices in a piece. Over the following pages, I’ll offer that information in an easy-to-understand manner.
Here’s something really interesting about color—it is essentially a property of light. You may know that light contains all the seven colors of VIBGYOR (violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red), which can be seen after a nice downpour when the sunlight streams through waterdrops.
So when you look at a surface and see a color, that’s because the surface is absorbing all the colors of the spectrum except the one that is being reflected, i.e., the color you’re able to see. By that logic, if you look at a poppy flower and it appears red, that means the surface of the poppy flower is absorbing all the colors and reflecting back only red.
Let’s begin by discussing why certain colors are so appealing and others not as much.
We’ll first review some of the basics.
COLOR TERMS
Primary Colors Think of primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) as the building blocks of a color spectrum or color wheel. These are the colors that cannot be created by mixing any other colors. However, by mixing primaries in different combinations, you can achieve all the other colors on the color wheel.
Secondary Colors These colors are created by mixing any two primary colors. They are orange, green, and violet.
Tertiary Colors Finally, we have the tertiary colors. These are the colors we get when we mix primary colors with secondary colors, using varying amounts or ratios. They are red-orange, yellow-orange, blue-green, yellow-green, blue-violet, and red-violet.
All these colors come together to create this circular gathering called a color wheel. They look so beautiful, right? In the next section, we’ll learn how to create a color wheel!
COLOR TEMPERATURES
The color wheel can be divided into two halves, based on temperature. When you look at the color wheel, try to notice which half feels warm and which feels cooler.
Red, orange, yellow, and all the colors that fall between them evoke a warm feeling because we associate these colors with sunlight, fire, and so on. These colors also evoke energetic feelings.
The other half of the color wheel feels cooler. Blue, green, and violet are usually associated with cooler things in nature like ice, the ocean, the sky, or foliage. These colors evoke more calming feelings.
It’s worth noting that every color can have a warm or cool undertone, which we also call bias. We’ll learn more about this in “The Joy of Exploring & Mixing Colors” (here-here).
THE CHARACTERISTICS OF COLORS
Now let’s take a quick look at some of the characteristics of colors. There are four main characteristics:
Hue Defined as the pure color, it also refers to the name of that color. There are 12 hues on the color wheel.
Tint Generally defined as adding white to any color to achieve varying degrees of lightness. When working with watercolor, you create a lighter tint of a hue by mixing more water into it.
Tone To create a more desaturated or subdued version of a hue, gray is added and the resulting mix is called a tone of the original hue. Grays can be warm or cool, and that will impact the final mixture.
Shade Defined as adding black to any hue. Personally, I don’t like mixing black with my colors. I usually mix in a deep, dark smoky navy, like Payne’s gray. Sometimes I mix a neutral color like raw or burnt umber, or even a combination of raw sienna and ultramarine that makes for a gorgeous shade of a deep, dark neutral. It almost looks black, but it’s not as flat as pure black.
