Art Theory 101 - Color

Color is one amongst the most powerful elements. It has got qualities that are remarkably expressive. It is quite important to understand the uses of a color.’Color’ is a general term that applies to all objects-white, black, violet, blue, green, yellow, orange and red and to all of its combinations.

‘Hue’ is the appropriate word suitable for for referring a pectrum of colors. Any notable color can be described in terms of the value and its hue. Moreover, various psychological and physical phenomena combine together affecting our perception towards a color.

‘Value’ is the term used to describe the darkness or lightness of a color. It indeed is a vital for an artist or a designer in the way it designs the spatial illusions. The contrast of a value isolates the objects in the space, while the value gradation suggests contour and mass of the contiguous surface.

Hue is the term for the pure spectrum colors commonly referred as red, orange, yellow, blue, green violet which appear in the hue circle or rainbow. In theory all hues can be mixed from three basic hues, known as primaries. When pigment primaries are all mixed together, the speculative result is black. Therefore pigment mixture is at times referred to as subtractive mixture.

The primary colors consist of three hues from which we can theoretically mix all other hues. There are two commonly used definitions of primary colors: Painters Primaries consist of red, blue and yellow, Printers Primaries consist of magenta, cyan and yellow, and Light Primaries consist of red, blue and green.

Complements are the colors that stand contrary to one another on a hue circle. When a complement is mixed with another complement in the paint, the resultant tone de-saturates or dulls the hues. These opposite pairs can even be traced with respect to their relative coolness and warmth. The cool-warm contrast of the hue can cause an image to appear to recede or advance. For instance, in a 15th century painting, warm reds of the doublet of a man and the cap of his son reinforce the placement cues in order to make the figures to appear very close. On the contrary, the cool variants of the sky and the sea suggest a great distance.

Few of the color effects occur in only in the brain and eye of the viewer and not the physical components of the pigments or light waves. The illusions are very dominant however and have got a tremendous impact on our reflection to the color.

Optical mixtures can be obtained when particles of variant colors are mixed. The mixture type differs from the pigment mixture it is based on the light primary colors. But however, the optical mixture differs from a pigment mixture where the primaries are mixed to black and from the optical mixture where the primaries are mixed to white. The hue and the value in the optical mixture can be averaged and that results in the grey.

Optical mixture is experienced when examining many textiles. It can also be perceived in natural objects, color television, and printed color pictures.