Color theory 101: an Artists guide to Color

Color theory 101: an Artists guide to Color is Basic, but important.

Picking the perfect greens for an landscape, or the bright hues of a sunset is something every artist ponders. Even the most experienced artist thinks through his palette before putting down that first line.

If you’re just starting out, or have been in the art world for a while, let me ask you a question?

Have you ever started a project, poured your heart into it, then when finished, just hated it? Or you stare at it wondering what you could have done better and not see what you need to see? There is a psychcology of color for artists, and it effects us all.

Did you think through your colors before starting? Beginners think that artist “just know” what works together. While experience helps, we still rely on that “can’t live without” color wheel.

Basics

Remember hearing about primary, secondary, and tertiary colors? They’re pretty important if you want to understand, well, everything else about color.

Primary Colors

Primary colors are those you can’t create by combining two or more other colors together. They’re a lot like prime numbers, which can’t be created by multiplying two other numbers together.

There are three primary colors:

• Red
• Yellow
• Blue

Think of primary colors as your foundation colors, anchoring your design in a general color scheme. Any one or combination of these colors can give you an UNLIMITED number of shades, tones, and tints (we’ll talk about those in just a minute).

Mixing 2 primary colors gives us:

Secondary Colors

Secondary colors are the colors that are formed by combining any two of the three primary colors listed above. Check out the color theory model above — see how each secondary color is supported by two of the three primary colors?

There are three secondary colors: orange, purple, and green. You can create each one using two of the three primary colors. Here are the general rules of secondary color creation:

• Red + Yellow = Orange
• Blue + Red = Purple
• Yellow + Blue = Green

Keep in mind that the color mixtures above only work if you use the purest form of each primary color. This pure form is known as a color’s hue, and you’ll see how these hues compare to the variants underneath each color in the color wheel below.

Tertiary Colors

Tertiary colors are created, when you mix a primary color, with secondary color.

From here, color gets a little more complicated. And if you want to learn how the experts choose color in their design, you’ve got to first understand all the other components of color.

The most important component of tertiary colors, is that not every primary color can match with a secondary color to create a tertiary color. For example, red can’t mix in harmony with green, and blue can’t mix in harmony with orange — both mixtures would result in a slightly brown color (unless of course that’s what you’re looking for).

Instead, tertiary colors are created when a primary color mixes with a secondary color that comes next to it on the color wheel below. There are six tertiary colors that fit this requirement:

• Red + Purple = Red-Purple (magenta)
• Red + Orange = Red-Orange (vermillion)
• Blue + Purple = Blue-Purple (violet)
• Blue + Green = Blue-Green (teal)
• Yellow + Orange = Yellow-Orange (amber)
• Yellow + Green = Yellow-Green (chartreuse)

The Color Theory Wheel

So great, we’ve got out 12 main colors.

I need MORE!!!!

Let’s go back to the color wheel…..

When choosing colors for a color scheme, the color wheel gives you opportunities to create brighter, lighter, softer, and darker colors by mixing white, black, and gray with the original colors. These mixes create the color variants described below:

Hue

Hue is pure color. All of the primary and secondary colors, for instance, are “hues.”

Shade

A “shade” is technically the color that you get when you add black to any given hue. The various “shades” just refer to how much black you’re adding.

Think of yourself being out on a sunny day, standing in the “shade”. When you look around, you still see the color in some areas and darker color in other areas. It’s the variance of how much black you add.

Tint

A tint is adding white to a color. Again, you can arrive at many colors by the amount of white added. This can take you to almost translucent.

Tone (or Saturation)

Tone and saturation essentially mean the same thing. This may sound confusing, but a tone is how saturated a color is. As you add black or white, it is less saturated.

What is CMYK?

This is a standard printers use.

CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key (Black). Those also happen to be the colors listed on your ink cartridges for your printer. That’s no coincidence.

CMYK is the subtractive color model. It’s called that because you have to subtract colors to get to white. That means the opposite is true — the more colors you add, the closer you get to black. Still with me?

What is RGB?

RGB color models, are designed for electronic displays, including computers.

RGB stands for Red, Green, Blue, and is based on the additive color model of light waves. This means, the more color you add, the closer you get towards white. Computers use RGB creating  scales from 0 to 255. Black would be R=0, G=0, and B=0. White would be R=255, G=255, and B=255.

Why should you know this?

There may be times you will want to print your work. Sometimes, your artwork will not print as you originally created it. Having at least a basic knowledge of this helps, because, you can go into a graphics program resetting certain areas. This is not an uncommon practice as different computers and printers will pick up colors differently.

Using a “hex code” to compare with your artwork and enter those values for a good match.

How do you use the color wheel? Let me know.