Color-Intro to Drawing Bad Art

It's time to enter the kingdom of color! This is honestly My favorite video I've done for the Intro to Drawing Bad Art Course.

In this video my goal was to do a broad overview of the basics of color theory for artists, and then give some practical advice on how to approach color. 

Color is all about controlling and balancing Hue, Chroma and Values. In this video I explore each of those characteristics of color. And then demonstrate my approach to finding that balance.

The Color Amp

Because I love musical metaphors, I compare the three characteristics of color to the knobs on a guitar amp.

A guitar amp has various knobs that affect the characteristics of the sound that the amp picks up from the guitar. To get the desired sound, a guitar player turns these knobs to find an appropriate balance.

On the color amp we have three knobs we are trying to balance: Hue, Chroma, and Value.

Hue: what color is it?

The first knob on the color amp is hue. And it controls what color we are using.

The Color Wheel:

My Goal was not to make a "color theory" video, full of color wheel jargon. But there are points about the color wheel that require some terms. This is the most jargon-y part.

This will likely be review for you, but...There are three primary colors: Red, Yellow, and Blue

You mix the primary colors to get secondary colors: Green, Orange, and violet

You mix a primary color with a secondary color to get a tertiary color: red orange, yellow orange, yellow green, blue green, blue violet, red violet.

Analogous colors are colors that are right next to each other on the color wheel.

Complimentary colors are colors that are directly across from each other on the color wheel. Yellow is the complimentary to violet, orange is the complimentary to blue, green is the complimentary to red, and all the tertiary colors have compliments too.

Complimentary colors neutralize each other. 

Colors also look more lively and vivid when juxtaposed or contrasted against their opposite.

Usually to achieve this liveliness of colors you will mix a wider variety of analogous colors from one side of the color wheel and a smaller variety from the opposite side of the color wheel, the complimentary side, for accents.

The color wheel is divided into a warm half and a cool half. This will come in handy later as it can simplify a lot of the above information into a more intuitive way to think about color when making art.

Chroma: How Pure or Neutral is the Hue?

The chroma knob controls how pure or neutral the hue is. How saturated or desaturated. 

All the colors on the outside of the color wheel above are full chroma. That means they are as pure as they are going to get.

If you try to make a drawing or painting out of those pure, high chroma colors it will look noisy and busy. The colors all compete for attention. And since our eyes are drawn to bright vibrant colors, we just won't know where to look.

to make the colors communicate with each other better, and create a sense of color harmony you have to neutralize them. 

You can think of gray as a common language among colors.

One way to neutralize a color is to add gray. Another way is, again, to add the complimentary.

Ex. add a little blue to orange to make a more neutral orange. Make a 50/50 mix to get a gray, mix a little orange to blue to get a neutral blue. 

One important concept about chroma is the idea of Chromatic Proportion.

Chromatic Proportion is about finding a balance between low chroma and high chroma colors.

The proportion is:

The more space a color occupies in your piece, the less chromatic or saturated the color should be.

The more chromatic or pure a color is, the less space it should occupy in your piece.

There are only a few high chroma areas in this Caravaggio piece. Most of the colors are variations grayish colors. Despite how intense that red on the fabric seems. The effect is achieved through building up to the full chroma red with a higher proportion of muted, or neutral, variations.

These are the only high chroma, saturated colors in the painting.

If every color were as saturated as these colors, these colors would lose their power and the painting would be much less dynamic.

Value: How light or dark is the color?

I think value is the most important knob on the color amp. Because if you turn off the hue and chroma knobs, you can still represent something using only value.

Often when you think you are struggling with color, you are really struggling with value.

Example: In the above picture I drew a box. I put an orange light above the box. the top plane of the box is receiving this orange light. So the planes facing away from the light are in shadow.

The light is orange, and since I studied my color theory jargon, I know that the top of the box should be orange and the shadows should be blue. Good Reasoning in terms of colors.

However, I made a very common mistake. The blue (shadow color) is lighter than the orange (the light color.) 

This example is slightly exaggerated to illustrate the point. You might not be as far off as I was here. But it's common to forget about values when working with color.

If your colors look weird, check your values first. 

You know when some electronic in your house stops working, the first step is to make sure it's plugged in? that's what value is to color. 

I've done a whole intro to drawing bad art lesson on value so I don't spend too much time on it in this video.

But if you understand value and wish to enter the kingdom of color, the most straightforward way in is to pick up a color and start drawing like it as you would with a normal pencil.

Figure out the value range and make a drawing in that color. This is called a monochromatic drawing.

Then the next step is simply doing that with more colors.

I think the essential difference between a monochromatic drawing and a full color drawing is warm and cool

So, remember:

the warm and cool of the color wheel.

create a conversation between warm and cool colors, using the common language of gray 

understand value first.

TLDR:

If you can try to think about color in terms of value first, and then just use variations of warm and cool grayed down colors to build the values, you are in business.

Other resources on color:

I learned most of what I know about color from James Gurney. Especially his book color and light but also from watching his video lessons and YouTube videos.

Marco Bucci's ten minute to better painting video about Color Harmony

Color Theory Basics for oil painting by Stephen Bauman