Artist Toolbox: Color

A practical guide to color and its uses in art

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• Publisher: Walter Foster Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781633224551
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Techniques

ArtistToolbox: Color explains how color captures mood and helps communicate meaning, as well as how to use color to create personal, expressive works of art. In ArtistToolbox: Color, painters will learn how to create impactful work with an understanding of basic color theory. Topics include the color wheel, hue, saturation, value, temperature, relativity, color relationships, and color mixing. You will learn how color captures mood and to communicate meaning with nothing more than color as youcreate personal, expressive works of art. Step-by-step projects and accessible technique demonstrations show color theory in action, making this book a useful reference for any beginning artist's library. The ArtistToolbox series provides easy-to-use reference guides for beginning and aspiring artists. While many instructional art books gloss over important concepts, focusing instead on how to replicate a piece of art, the ArtistToolbox series breaks down the whats, whens, whys, and hows of each relevant tool or technique, clearly demonstrating its purpose and how to employ it to achieve the desired effects.

CHAPTER 1: Color Basics & Painting Concepts

To have a meaningful discussion about color, we must be familiar with its scientific origins and the vocabulary used to describe its characteristics. Then we can build on this knowledge to discuss color as it is used in art to craft a message—from directing the viewer’s eye to hinting at a particular mood and accurately suggesting a sense of time and place. This broad chapter covers the following topics:

• What Is Color?

• Color Terms & Properties

• Color, Light & Shadow

• Color Relativity

• Color Psychology

• Color & Mood

• Color Schemes

• Color & Composition

• Infusing Color

WHAT IS COLOR?

Color is a phenomenon of perception and reaches our eyes in a way you may not expect. Colors are actually wavelengths of light; when an object is red, it is reflecting red wavelengths and absorbing all other colors. In other words, you could say that a rose isn’t red—it’s reflecting red.

The first person to present this idea was Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) in the late 1600s. He conducted and published a series of experiments involving prisms, light, and color, which form the basis of our current understanding of color. These experiments involved refracting white light through a prism—a simple triangular glass object that separated light waves into individual colors. The results revealed that light could actually be broken down into seven individual colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Until this discovery, it was assumed that a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Color Basics & Painting Concepts
• Chapter 3: Color Mixing
• Chapter 4: Painting Demonstrations
• Copyright