Colour Theory - Itten and the Muddy Colours
,Come here, come near, fellow artists and let me tell you about colours! They exist - end of journal Some people might already know everything that is talked about in this journal, others might feel like on their first day of school. I just hope, I can give a little knowledge of how colours work and maybe even on how that might help you with your art :DHere we go!What is a colour?I guess, we all have an idea or a concept of the answer to that question. But putting it into words is probably impossible for the most of us.Yet the answer is very simple: A colour is nothing but light. Light that is reflected by solids, to be precise. This also means (and now hold your brains in place) that solid bodies are not coloured. Their surface is constituted in a way that reflects the light, that we percieve as colour(s). How?,Light is made of different waves; x-rays, gamma rays, radiowaves etc. Colours are the visible ones. Prisms, for example, can break light into the different colours. ➡Source: White Light Split Into Colours By A Prism, by Pasieka There are three “main“-colours, primary colours, that are important now: Red, Green and Blue. If they get mixed with one another, they can appear as pretty much every other colour we can percieve.In school one of your teachers might have shown you an experiment with three coloured glass panels. Put over each other, with light behind them, it looked something like this: ,Beautiful isn’t it? To give you an example, let’s have a look at the surface of a lemon. And not of the rough and wavey peel, but of the surface microscopical:,When all the colour waves hit the surface of that lemon peel, the green and red waves are reflected, the blue ones are absorbed. Red and green light mixed, appear as yellow. With a tomato it would be the Red waves that are reflected and Blue and Green would be absorbed and so on. Of course there are a lot more colour waves, but as artists we should only care about those mentioned above for now.Knowing now the basics of how colours come to be, let’s talk about colour spaces.RGB & CMYK, letters of a modern artistA colour space is the variety of colours that can be mixed/ displayed with a certain colouring method. There are more than 70 known colour spaces, but important to us are only two: RGB and CMYK, light colours and body colours.RGB is, as you might have put together yourselves, the abbrevation for Red, Green, Blue and represents, of course, the light colours; also known as additive colour mixing. It is the colour space we are confronted with every day, for it is used on every screen (TV, Smartphone, Notebook etc.).CMYK, abbrevation for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and the Key-colour black, aka subtractive colour mixing, is used in printing. You might have seen them before, if you ever had to change ink cartridges in a printer. CMYK is reffered to as body colours. I’ve actually never been told why, but I guess it’s because they are literally solid.,,,This picture shows another important difference between those two: there are a lot more light colours than body colours. Which is pretty much the reason why, for example, photographs look different when you print them, than shown on screen. Source: printful.comBut many of you are painting traditionally only, so while light and printing is all interesting and stuff, you might wonder what you can do with this information.The (not so much third) WheelMany of us have seen it before, mostly in school:THE COLOUR WHEEL (circus music playing)For the ones who haven’t, here a little explanation:,As you can see, the colour wheel “is an abstract illustrative organization of color hues around a circle, which shows the relationships between primary colors, secondary colors, tertiary colors etc.” (source: Wikipedia)Thank you, Wiki. 👀What are primary and secondary colours? There is one colour wheel presentation by Johannes Itten, that is taught in most schools. It is the one you can see above. Basically it says, that there are three primary colours, in this case Red, Yellow, Blue, with which you can mix the secondary colours, Orange, Purple, Green. And with them you can mix the tertiary.Our arts teacher would give us a task, that looked like this:,We had to paint the primary colours from our paint boxes⬅,and with them, we had to mix the secondary colours ⬅We had to mix them, we weren’t allowed to use the ones from the paint boxes. And that led to a little problem. Orange looks okay, but Green and Purple always look dirty; purple even pretty dark. Maybe you came across this issue as well. Now, what does that have to do with me and anything?Well, I don’t want to say that Itten was wrong (because he obviously wasn’t ... not that much, at least 😬), but his concept appears to be not ideal when it comes to only use three colours for mixing everything you need. How can you make the purple shinier? etc.If just someone could come and save the day ...Time for Captain CMYK! ,If we do try it now with CMY(not so much K), the exercise would look like this:,First the primary colours⬅Okay for a start, but now comes the moment of truth:,mixing the secondaries⬅A lot better, don't you think? No? Blue and Red are missing? Well, remember tertiary colours?,BOOM! You can mix Blue from Cyan + Purple and Red from Magenta + Orange, thus the original primary colours become the tertiary. This wouldn't be working the other way around without adding more water (which would still look dirty and also make the paint more transparent) or using premixed colours.Like myself, I guess, that most of you have a variety of colours at home. But I remember a time when I started painting and was given Red, Blue and Yellow from a friend as a starter kit. I didn't have much money and you all know that good artist stuff is not for free. So I had to go with them, but didn't get very far. And maybe if you are in the same position, you'd rather like to try it with CMY (maybe even K). Wait! You can't find Magenta or Cyan???? There is only Red and Blue to choose from??? Don't worry! In this video the artist gives a demonstration of warm and cool colours and their relation to each other. And while doing so, she also provides a little more in depth explanation about why the secondary colours of Itten (can) turn out muddy in the first place and how you can avoid that by chosing the "right" Red and Blue. Well, this is all I can tell you. I am not a professional, so I still have to learn as well (contrast is my kryptonite), but I felt with understanding how colours work, it became easier to use them. And maybe this "little" post has the same effect on you. ❤Be creative, love what you do (even when it doesn't turn out the way you want it), stay healthy and thank you for reading this far :3...
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