Chapter 8: Color and Its Use in Picture Making

Second only to value is the importance of color. Color, above and beyond all other artistic principles, is the most seductive and most expressive. We all react immediately to color. It is what we use to fire emotions in our art. Color is probably the most studied and hardest to master of all the elements of art.

This chapter quickly covers some general color concepts that you have probably heard before. This review is important because many of us could be better with our use of color. Though this chapter is not about doing exercises, you can duplicate all of these examples using virtually any piece of 2D software.

The Four Primary Characteristics of Color

Color has four easily seen, understood , and measured characteristics. It is absolutely critical that all visual artists understand these characteristics.

Hue

Hue is fairly straightforward. Hue is the base color; it is red, blue, or any other color that you can name . In light, a color can have only one hue. A light's color corresponds directly with the hue wavelength in the spectrum, as shown in Figure 8.1.

Figure 8.1: The colors of the spectrum are represented by individual hues.

The only way to change a color's hue is to mix it with another color. Mixing colors results in a completely new hue with an entirely different wavelength. Working on a computer screen is exactly the opposite of working in paint. In light, your primary colors are red, blue, and green, with your secondary colors being yellow, magenta , and cyan. Light color is an additive process where the addition of all colors will result in white light. Paint colors, on the other hand, are a subtractive process where the addition of color darkens and lessens the effect of light. Theoretically, the addition of all paint colors will result in black. Paint primaries are red, yellow, and blue, with the secondary colors being orange, green, and violet .

Value

The value of a color is either how light or dark a color is. A color's value can be a tricky thing to understand. Some color value is easy to understand. When a blue's value is raised, and the color gets lighter, we still recognize the resulting color as blue. Red, on the other hand, is different. When we lighten the value of red, we get an entirely different color that we know as pink. The change of a color's value is shown in Figure 8.2.

Figure 8.2: A color's value is represented by how dark or light that color appears.

Chroma

For some, the concept of chroma seems to be very hard to grasp. Chroma is simply the intensity of the hue, as shown in Figure 8.3. As a color approaches a neutral gray, it is decreasing in chroma.

Figure 8.3: Chroma is represented by how gray a color looks.

Temperature

Color temperature (shown in Figure 8.4) is the most difficult of these four concepts to understand because it can be so relative. Usually, we think that the warm colors are yellow, orange, and red and the cool colors are green, blue, and violet. The reality is that depending on the surroundings, any color can be either warm or cool.

Figure 8.4: Temperature is represented by how warm or cool a color appears.