Okay, let's continue our discussion from previous newsletters regarding the fundamental elements of fine art painting which includes the following:
1. Concept
2. Composition
3. Drawing
4. Values/Edges
5. Color
6. Technique
7. Presentation
This month I'll talk a little bit about color. Color is a complex topic and many volumes have been written about it, however I will focus on some of the basics.
Color has three qualities or characteristics: hue, value and chroma.
You may have made a color wheel at some point in the past where you placed your primary colored paint (red, yellow and blue) equidistant apart on your paper or canvas and then mixed them together in various combinations to form the secondary colors (orange, green and violet). You can then further mix these colors to form tertiary colors such as yellow-orange or blue-violet. So the term "hue" refers to where a color lies on this color wheel. Is it green, yellow-orange, red violet, etc.? Hue is essentially the name of the color.
Value, as we discussed in a previous newsletter, is how light or dark a color is. If you were to take a black and white photo of a color it would fall somewhere on a scale between black at one end and white at the other, with various shades of gray in between. Value is the most important characteristic of color as it essentially creates the design or composition in a painting.
The third quality of color is chroma and it refers to simply how intense or dull is the color. A color is reduced in chroma, or grayed, by mixing it with the color directly opposite on the color wheel, called it's complement. For instance, the complement of green is red so the chroma of an intense green could be reduced by adding red to it. Many artists reserve the most intense colors for use at the focal point in order to help direct the viewers eye there. For instance, in the painting below, "Billowy Clouds", I used the high chroma red for the barn which is the focal point. I further emphasized this focal point by using contrasting values there with the light barn roof adjacent to the dark trees.
