#MastoArtStudy Exercise N07

It’s been way too long since our last #MastoArtStudy, six weeks actually. I got very busy with a commission and then shortly after I fell ill with an infection. Been visiting the doctor and poppin pills, but things are stabilizing now. So I’m eager to get back to learning my craft and hopefully teach you a thing on the way!

Let’s talk about color theory. It is a very broad subject and many books have been written about it during the last centuries. It was the study of how light breaks through a prism and how you could get all colors by mixing the right pigments. In theory – depending on the quality of the pigments – you can get almost all colors by mixing red, yellow and blue paint (and white to vary in lightness). These are called the primary colors. In modern printing we can get all colors by mixing four inks: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key(black).

We can also think of red, green and blue (RGB color model) as the primary colors, but this is solely for mixing light which is much more precise than mixing pigments. Each pixel in your screen has a red, a green and a blue lamp. Mixing the strength of these lights can give you all visible colors. Crazy huh? That is because this system is similar to how the lightcones work in our eyeballs. A creature with different lightcones, such as a tiger, wouldn’t actually see the things we can see on our computer screens. So if you ever need to communicate with an alien, maybe don’t draw up your phone but draw something on paper instead.

The study of colors goes back to ancient times, but it was Isaac Newton(1642–1726) who lay the groundworks for a scientific approach. He’s also the one who invented the Color Wheel. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe(1749–1832) was the first to study the effects of color on human perception and refined the color wheel to the one we mainly use today. Though many of his hypotheses have since been rebuked, Goethe’s Theory of Color had a strong influence on the art community of his time. And from his revised color wheel arises our current understanding of Color Harmony and the aesthetic preferences being taught in art classes today.

Color Harmony

What colors mix well together in a painting? This topic is of course highly subjective and everyone’s preference depends on their cultural upbringing and their emotional relationship to a color. Still, you’ve probably have seen some paintings where the colors seem just too harsh together, or a sofa where pillows just don’t match its color. I’ve had alot of paintings like this, where I just couldn’t put my finger on why I didn’t like the colors. Too bright, too in conflict with each other. But yet on the other hand the Ikea logo seems to work just fine! Bright yellow letters upon a strong blue background?

The way colors relate to each other is where their placements are on the color wheel. Colors harmonize when they fall into these relationships: monochromatic, diadic, complementary, split complementary, triadic, analogous, double complementary, rectangular tetradic, square tetradic…

Goodness, that was a mouthful. Do you need to learn all of these? Nah, probably best just to focus on the general gist of it. To understand it you just have to get more familiar with…

The Color Wheel

The standard color wheel is the RYB color wheel. Here we distinquish between primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. The primary colors are Red, Yellow, and Blue. And the secondary colors are the colors if you mix the primary ones:

Red + Yellow = Orange
Yellow + Blue = Green
Blue + Red = Purple

Then the tertiary colors are all the colors between the primary and secondary (Blue + Green = Blue-Green/Turqouise).

Complementary colors

Now, each color on the color wheel has an opposite color. We call these complementary colors. For red this is green, for blue this orange, for yellow this is purple. Why do they compliment each other? Because they make each other stand out. These colors are impossible to mix. They cancel each other out, always creating either grey or brown if you mix them and that’s why they create a very strong contrast. Remember that Ikea logo? The letters are written in yellow-orange on a blue-purple background. You can’t get more complementary than that! That’s why you can recognize their logo from hundreds of meters away.

Apparantly we humans really like it when colors oppose each other. Why, we don’t know, but there might be a biological reason. Because whenever you stare at a coloured shape and then look away towards a blank wall, you’ll still see the shape dancing in front of your eyes. This is called the afterimage, but the afterimage is always in the complementary color of the original shape. So if you look at a yellow star, its afterimage will be a violet star.

Since these colors contrast, a complementary color scheme in your painting makes for a very readable picture. For example, an orange autumn leaf on a blue table cloth really makes the leaf pop out at the viewer.

This is an example of a painting made with a typical complementary color scheme. Orange for the setting sun, blue for the shadows.

Or this one, a painting of mine made with a red-orange and light blue color scheme:

As you can see with these examples, you don’t have limit yourself to just two colors. You can use a full range of colors, but you have to think of your overall composition. You can also use other color schemes like Split-complementary where you pick a color, and then you choose the two colors besides its complementary color in your color scheme. But I think the gist of using complementary harmonies is to be mindful of the overall picture and choose colors that contrast each other where you want to put emphasis on the shapes and silhouettes.

Analogous color schemes

This color scheme is really quite common. It means you choose a color on the color wheel and pick the ones besides to make your painting. Colors close to another on the color wheel harmonize very well. This is very common for paintings of sunsets and landscapes. It is easy and makes for a very pleasing image, but you must take great care in choosing the correct values, so shading is paramount.

This one for example, made in orange-red, orange, and yellow-orange:

This is a painting of mine of a prehistoric whale, made primarily in blue-purple, blue and blue-green.

However, what you can do in analogous color schemes is just add a tad bit of contrasting color into the mix to really spice up the picture. An excellent example of this is Theodor Kittelsens Nøkken. A primarily yellow, yellow-orange and black color scheme. But all of a sudden two bright blue-green eyes rise out of the water.

How colors change each other

When painting with contrasting colors it is very important to know that sometimes they contrast too much, making the whole picture jarring. You paint an orange-red sunset and you want add a splash of blue-green somewhere, and suddenly the blue shears through the whole composition! Like a bright neon green that just shouldn’t be there! Quite often it is enough to just add a bit of gray with a blue-green tint instead. In contrast to the orange or red this will look like blue. Same goes for blue color schemes, adding a bit of brown(orange with a low saturation) will often result in an orange color. So using a complementary color but with a low saturation (mixed with gray) often gives the best results.

The exercise

You can paint anything you want and in any style you want! However you must pick a complementary color scheme! You can make an almost analogous picture if you want, but there must be complementary element in their somewhere. If you’re working in Krita, check out Krita’s amazing Gamut Masks for their Artistic Color selector. You can find them under Settings – Dockers. They allow you to lock your color picker to certain color schemes such as complementary and split-complementary.

When you’re done, post your image to Mastodon using the #MastoArtStudyNumber7 hashtag.

Deadline!

You get two weeks for this one so the deadline will be on april 11th. Good luck and I’m really looking forward to seeing your entries!

Giving and receiving constructive feedback

Now a big point of #MastoArtStudy is giving each other constructive feedback. This does not mean bashing somebody over the head with what they did wrong, but rather pointing out what the artist did right in the drawing and pointing out the area’s where the artist could improve. Now when receiving constructive feedback, don’t take it personally. The feedback is meant to help you improve. We all have to improve, that’s why we’re doing these studies. So try to refrain from making excuses or explanations for the area’s other artists point out where you should improve, listen and set goals for your next drawing based on the feedback you’ve received.

If you really don’t want to receive feedback, but you still want to share your exercise sketch using the #MastoArtStudyNumber7 hashtag, then please write No feedback in your post.