Understanding Art: Color Revealed

by Domen Lombergar

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 correct word to apply to refer to just the pure spectrum colors. Any given color can be expressed in terms of its value and hue. In addition, the various physical phenomena and psychological effects combine to affect our perceptions of 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 primaries comprises of three hues from which all the other hues can be created. Primary colors have 2 commonly used definitions: Painters primaries consisting of red, yellow and blue, Printer primaries consisting of magenta, yellow and cyan and Light Primaries consisting of red, green and blue.

Complements are the color variants that contradict one another in the circle of hues. When the complements happen to mix with another in the paint, the resultant mixture dulls or de-saturates the hues. Opposite pairs, as such, can also be found based on the relative coolness and warmth. The contrast of the hue’s warmth and coolness can make the image to advance or even recede in appearance. For instance, take the example of a painting belonging to the 15th century. The reds of the son’s cap and that of the man’s the placement of the hues so as to make the things match very close.

Few color effects happen only in the eye as well as on the brain of a percipient and not by the properties of the light waves and pigments. However, these illusions appear dominant and show a big impact on our responses to a color.

Optical mixture occurs when small particles of different colors are mixed in the eye; this type of mixture differs from pigment mixture in that it is based on light primaries. However, optical mixture varies from light mixture in which the primaries will mix to white, and from pigment mixture, in which the primaries mix to black. There is an averaging of hue and value in optical mixture which results in grey.

Optical mixture can be felt when designing the textiles. It can also be experienced in natural objects, printed color pictures and in color television.

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