Hey, everyone. Welcome to the first video in the Color Theory Series.
Color theory, color concepts...
In this video, I'm going to go over just a crap ton of color vocabulary and what those vocabulary words mean.
And in future videos I'm going to help you guys figure out color schemes for your design projects,
and how to mix colors more efficiently using fewer tubes of paint.
Because paint can get really expensive.
Umm, just a little, uh, bit of channel business before we get started.
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And obviously, I don't know a lot of different languages
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Look to the right. There should be a blue button.
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I was the broke kid in college. I know what it's like.    Art supplies are expensive. So, yeah! No skin off...
How does that saying go?
I don't know. Sometimes I don't understand American idioms. Eh.
But, anyway, don't worry about it if you can't.
If you really want to help, you can spread the word on that's what I'm doing, with that donate button,
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So, that's also helpful.
Back to color theory.
The first thing that I want to talk about is color modes.
You may have seen this in Photoshop, where, you know, the program asks you what color mode you want to use.
CMYK or RGB or Grayscale.
Okay, number one, I never use grayscale because...
I like— even if I'm doing a black and white something,
I want to be able to choose the undertones for the grays. Okay?
I like manipulating cool grays and warm grays and things like that.
And you can't do that with a completely stripped grayscale document.
Number two, CMYK versus RGB.
When do you use those?  What are those for?      What do those letters mean?
CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black.
K is for Black.
And, those are the four colors that your printer takes.
Okay, if you buy color cartridges for your printer, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.
And, CMYK color mode is for anything where...
It's going to be a physical, tangible thing.
Okay, you are photoshopping a photo or illustrations and you are going to print them onto paper.
CMYK color mode is also for mixing paints, because you're mixing pigments and putting them on paper.
So, when we talk about paint mixing, I'm going to show you the CMYK method.
And I know a lot of us grew up with the red, yellow, blue; those are primary colors and that's how you mix
all the colors... ok, that is a big, fat lie.
It is a conspiracy,  and...
No. I'm kidding. It's not a conspiracy.
But, it is inaccurate and inefficient.
I'm going to show you the CMYK way in the paint mixing video.
RGB is.. stands for Red, Green and Blue. And that is used for light.
Okay. So projections that will go, you know, from a projector, and project it to a wall or a screen,
Websites, predominantly. Okay, so if you are designing websites.
That's all that I can think of.
So, stuff that's light. Stuff that's gonna be on a screen.
Not stuff that's printed, you know, on a piece of paper.
Next, every color is defined by these three things.
VST:  Value, Saturation, and Temperature.
Alright. So first, value.
Value means the lightness or the darkness of a color.
Alright? And...
You know, I have all of these grays, okay, and...
Have you heard of a gray scale or a value scale?
It shows the lightness and the darkness of colors.
This is the Prismacolor warm gray set.
Here is the 10%
Now here is the 20%
And it gets darker and darker. These are your values.
Right? And colors also have values, like...
Why is this marker so dirty? Let's reject that because its all dirty.
I'm going to put this away, because...
Alright!
So we have this value. And then we have this value.
Right, it's much lighter, right? It's that same kind of yellow orange color.
But it's much lighter; so the lightness or the darkness of a color.
Here's a color wheel. I use color wheels in class to teach concepts.
I will...I bought these on Amazon. This one and this one.
And I'll drop the links if you are interested in purchasing these for your own education.
But, you see here where they have values, okay, 100% white to 100% black?
And, each color has a value.
When you look at this yellow orange, what value is it?
Which percentage gray does it match up with?
So, the easiest way to do that is to kinda swivel this around,
and look down and kinda squint your eyes, ok?
I love teaching this in class because all my students make ridiculous faces.
And if it is a similar value, or the correct value match, then...
This line should start blurring when you start squinting your eyes.
See,
These two, their values don't match at all. So, no matter how much you squint...
You see that separation between the yellow-orange and this gray.
But this one, that one is pretty close.
So, the line gets a little blurrier.
That one is actually a better value match, and so that line gets super blurry.
Alright.
So
Every color has a value. It's either a light color or a medium color, or a dark color.
And then you have the Saturation.
Saturation is the intensity of a color,
the brightness of a color. Not the lightness, okay?
Value is about lightness and darkness; saturation is about how...
Full of chroma it is. How saturated it is.
You have a color like this, and it is ORANGE, okay?
You can keep adding orange to that; it's not going to get much oranger.
This is goldenrod, this is a nice color I like to use for kind of dirty blonde looks when I'm illustrating,
and if you add more orange to that, it'll get oranger and oranger, ok?
It is not very saturated, so you can add more orange and it'll get oranger.
See?
