To use color effectively you need to understand what color is, not so much the physical make up as we touched on briefly above but what is color to an artist? Above all the color wheel functions as a prediction tool for mixing colors. His work ultimately lead to the refinement of our modern day artist’s color wheel. The convoluted and often misunderstood discussion of color really started clearing up when Isaac Newton began publishing his discoveries regarding light science in the late 1600s into early 1700s. For this reason many older cultures had a limited understanding of color and did not recognize or even have the vocabulary to describe the full spectrum of colors we have easy access to today. Throughout history each culture had their own theories of color that heavily depended upon the colors that were accessible to that culture at that point in time in their region of the world. The history of color is an interesting one and one that took thousands of years to develop into our modern day understanding of color. If there is no light to strike your eye there is no vision to be made! A Brief History of ColorĪs an artist you need to be able to mix colors in a predictable way and understand the colors that you are seeing in front of you. This is precisely why you don’t see a thing when you turn out the lights. When we see something, it’s the combination of our eyes receiving the light and our brain fabricating the mental image. Vision is our body’s reaction to electromagnet radiation of a certain wavelength (visible light spectrum). Yep, your brain makes it all up! There are many different types of electromagnetic radiation that our bodies come into contact with daily, but our brains don’t react to them equally. For all my student artists out there, I’ll attempt to define color in a single statement:Ĭolor is your brain’s interpretation of light waves that have come into contact with your eye. Most of us already have an idea of what color is but unfortunately we have been taught to think about color incorrectly.Īn intelligent discussion about color will require us to delve into science just a bit, but I promise to keep the scientific points to a minimum and relevant to your understanding color. This is a question I get often and while my answer has gotten more refined over the years it’s still a complicated topic to understand. Over the next several posts you’ll have a few mind-blowing moments as you gain a much better understanding of what is color and how to use it in your artwork. Color is a fascinating topic in art and is fun to explore but color is seldom understood as well as it should be.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |