Color Notes (read this before you start your color chart)

THE NATURE OF COLOR

Painting I

Stevenson

Color breaks down into three parts:

1.                   Value—the lightness or darkness of a color; how close is it to black or white?

2.                   Hue—the title of a color: yellow, red, blue, brown, etc.

3.                   Chroma—the strength or intensity of a color; also called saturation.

So, if any one of these elements changes from one color sample to another, then those two colors are technically not the same.  For instance, if the value and hue are the same, but the chroma is slightly more or less, then the colors being compared are different.   In the same way, two colors can actually be closer in nature than they initially appear by having the hue and chroma similar but the value much different.

Black and White

It is also important to note that black and white hues theoretically do not have chroma, only value.  Therefore they cannot be considered true colors (even though we tend to refer to them as such).  A color mixed with black is called a shade, color mixed with white is called a tint, and color mixed with a combination of black and white (achromatic gray, explained below) is called a tone.  The thing about black and white not being true colors is that a tint or a shade of any color is a change to that color’s value without changing that color’s hue.  It will also change the color’s intensity/chroma by diluting the pigment in the paint, and therefore making it less chromatically saturated or intense.  The density of a pigment suspension in oil paint is pretty much directly related to that color’s intensity.   Because of this, a color is at its highest intensity straight out of the tube, so a color mixed from two different pigments cannot be as chromatic as the pigments on their own.

Chroma at Value

Another thing that you will come be aware of is that each hue reaches its highest intensity at a different value.  Yellow is at its highest saturation at a very high key, whereas blue and violet are at their highest at a very low value.  Green, I think, is surprisingly high, similar to orange, which are both a little higher than red (though not much).  Earth tones tend to come from either broken prismatic (pure) colors or dark shades of high key hues.

It is worth noting that as shades of yellow darken—with more black added—the color that results looks green, even though the hue is still technically  yellow and hasn’t changed at all.  As more black is added to orange—without changing the hue—it gets brown.

Grays

There are basically two types of grays: “achromatic” grays and “chromatic” grays.  Achromatic grays are literally grays without any color, that is, they don’t have hue and or intensity, only value.  They are grays made by mixing black and white.  Chromatic grays are, not surprisingly, grays with color, or grays that involve mixing complimentary colors (and possibly white and/or black).  The range of chromatic grays is almost infinite, and a color is considered a chromatic gray as long it is at least slightly broken, or mixed with a compliment.  You can have a gray that is mixed with equal parts of red and green to make a very broken color that is close to the center of the color wheel, or one made of very unequal parts closer to the edge of the color wheel.  For instance, any blue that has even the slightest bit of orange in it is really a chromatic gray, because it is at least slightly broken by the orange.  It could still look extremely blue, especially if it’s put up against a much more broken or contrasting color, but it is a “gray” nonetheless.  So, paintings that look intensely colorful are often merely made up of chromatic grays.