Color Theory

 Color Theory

In the visual arts, color theory is guidance to color mixing and the visual impacts of specific color combination. There are also definitions of colors based on the color wheel: primary color, secondary color and tertiary color. Primary colors include the basic red, blue and yellow. The secondary colors are mixtures of that e.g. by mixing red and yellow we get orange, blue and red give purple and blue and yellow give green. Tertiary colors are the further mixtures of primary and secondary colors. I have a lot of experience in mixing colors and there is never a good way of mixing to get the right one. It always depends on the type of paint, the thickness, quality or brand.  

 

The color theory doesn’t end on visuals itself. Many like to divide colors into warm and cold. It is generally not remarked in modern color science or colorimetry in reference to painting, but is described as the observed contrast in landscape light, between the "warm" colors associated with daylight or sunset and the "cool" colors associated with a grey or overcast day. Many artists such as Allan Kirk use warm and cold colors to present the temperature in their paintings. One of his quotes says

 “I find the idea of cold and warm colours very helpful in my work. I respond intuitively to identify warm and cold colours as we all do, blue is cold red is warm. I set my palette out with cold colours at one end and warm at the other, I have three areas:

1. Cold blues,
2. Cold Cobalt colours
3. Warm earth colours (reds and yellows).”

He would use the warm earth colors like the reds and yellows to paint extremely hot objects like the sun or radiators and use grey- blue to represent cold items like metals or snow.
The primary colours themseves cannot produce a perfect grey in my opinion. There is a need of white & black paint in the mixture in order to make the colors brighter or darker.
In science, a mixture of green, blue and red creates white. Unfortunarly in art, this is not the case.

Compare the traditional warm–cool association of color with the color temperature of a theoretical radiating black body, where the association of color with temperature is reversed. For instance, the hottest stars radiate blue light and the coolest radiate red.

Another area in the color theory is 'Tints and Shades'. This area is all about specific mixtures of colored light and the achromatic mixture of spectrally balanced red, green and blue (RGB) is always white, not gray or black.

When we mix colorants, such as the pigments in paint mixtures, a color is produced which is always darker and lower in chroma, or saturation, than the parent colors. This moves the mixed color toward a neutral color—a gray or near-black; however you cannot create perfect black with just mixtured of color.