Understanding color gives the artist a great advantage in our painting skills. Artist use their knowledge of color to create beautiful paintings.
When light shines on an object, some of the light rays bounce back, off the object. The remaining light rays are absorbed by the object.
The light rays that bounce off an object are its color. For example, a green object bounces green light rays and absorbs the other colors.
The wise artist will use color to express different emotions in their paintings.
Warm colors generally create good feelings and cool colors feel calm and peaceful. There are exceptions to this generality, for example the warm color, red.
The renowned physicist Isaac Newton gave us the color wheel in the 1600s.
He was famous for explaining gravity, but he also devised the theory of light and color.
He noticed when light goes through a prism, it is divided into the colors of the rainbow.
The seven rainbow colors are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and purple.
Today the artist color wheel uses twelve colors, instead of the seven rainbow colors.
Artists have been using the knowledge of the color wheel to improve their paintings ever since.
The twelve colors of the artist color wheel are based on three primary colors; yellow, red and blue.
The paint colors closest to the primary colors are;
All other colors can be mixed from these three primary colors.
When we mix two of the primary colors together, we get a secondary color.
We mix yellow and red to get orange.
Yellow and blue together make green.
By mixing blue and red we get purple, also called violet.
For example, the primary color yellow mixed with the secondary green gives us yellow-green.
If we go to the other side of yellow and mix it with the secondary orange, we get yellow-orange.
The tertiary colors are;
yellow-green, yellow-orange, red-orange, red-violet, blue-violet and blue-green.
Learn more about the Color Wheel from Wikipedia
The artist color wheel contains warm colors and cool colors.
Red, orange and yellow are considered warm colors.
The warm colors appear to advance forward in the painting.
Blue, green and sometimes violet are normally considered cool colors.
Cool colors appear to recede into the distance.
Cooler and darker colors on the edge of the mangoes show them turning away from our view.
But you say, yellow, orange and red are all warm colors. You are correct.
Yellow is the warmest color. But the less yellow in a color, the cooler it gets. So orange is cooler than yellow. And red is cooler than orange and more cooler than yellow.
If the edge has bright light shining on it, you won't paint it darker. But still paint it cooler to show it turning away.
Paintings are usually done on a two dimensional surface, such as canvas or paper. We use color to create the illusion of distance and depth in our two dimensional paintings.
Particles of dust and moisture in the air cause this phenomenon called aerial or atmospheric perspective.
In the painting "Springtime" lightening the colors and adding blue, moves the mountains into the distance.
But notice the colors in the foreground are much warmer compared to the mountains.
Learn more about color by painting with a limited palette. Paint with the primary colors; yellow, red and blue.
An expanded palette of a warm and cool version of each primary makes it easier to mix other colors.
There is no need for black on your palette. It is easy to mix additional colors. Black, brown or grey are a mixture of complimentary colors.