Hello friends! Thank you for joining me
for Color Theory.
This is a class that I'm hoping will be really informative and also
teach you some interesting things about color mixing and color theory itself.
A color wheel is just one of the many types of ways
that you can organize and see how color
works together.
How do we see color?
Well, an object doesn't actually have adherent color
instead it's what is reflected off of the surface.
Some colors are reflected and actually some are absorbed.
So when you are seeing a color you are see what's reflected back to you.
An interesting fact, birds, fish and other mammals
perceive full spectrum of color, but bees, for example
can actually see colors that are invisible to humans.
Okay, let's have a fun doing maybe an experiment with afterimage.
I am going to bring this green square
and this shape.
What I want you to do is go ahead and look closely
at this green square for 30 seconds.
Okay, now take a gaze over to the white paper.
Do you see a red square?
That's part of the science of color theory that's really neat.
Maybe you want to do another one.
Try this one.
Okay, once you look over here what do you see?
Do you see a red square with a green triangle inside?
You can even try with other colors as well.
Here I have a yellow triangle.
And a purple triangle too.
Something that you can tell is
the pattern here between all the different colors.
If you guess that it's because they are opposites
you are absolutely correct.
These colors are what we call
"Complementary Colors"
And if you stared at this one long enough, go ahead
and look at there.
Do you get a big purple triangle with a small yellow triangle inside?
Pretty cool huh?
Here we have a basic color wheel.
These will have the primary colors of red,
yellow, blue,
and you'll also have your secondary colors.
So in-between these will be orange,
green,
and violet or purple.
And we're also looking at tertiary colors.
Those are colors that are in-between primary and secondary colors.
So we have red and orange, red-orange.
Orange and yellow, yellow-orange.
Green and yellow, yellow-green.
Green and blue, blue-green.
Blue and violet, blue-violet.
Violet and red, red-violet.
So this is one way to organize how all the different colors are together,
and work in cohesion in a color wheel.
Okay, let's have some fun painting.
So you don't need any really special supplies
in order to do a little color wheel experiment,
or just to make your own color mixing wheel.
You can use maybe if you got water colors around
your house, these are just little tempera
or poster paints.
You can also use some household objects
just for little pallets.
So we have some wax paper that you can spread some paint on.
Maybe take-out containers for leftovers.
I am actually using this as my water reservoir.
I also recommend having some scratch paper around
so it doesn't even have to be a full sheet,
you can have little bits-and-pieces too.
And this will help you test out some colors.
So what we're gonna do is go ahead and
try out making our color wheel and getting
all the colors.
So it's really neat is that technically you only need
really five colors in order to do all the different
things that you'll need in a color wheel.
So I've got my red, my yellow,
my blue,
my black, and my white.
And we'll talk a little bit more about those in a moment
So let's put some red on.
True red in its purest form.
Let me wash my brush off.
Another supply that is also helpful is that you could
have a paper towel or towel to help
dry off your brush so it's not so wet and soupy.
So let's do the yellow.
And since I already have my yellow out I can
go ahead and make my orange.
What really be just equal amounts of red and yellow.
And don't worry, neatness doesn't have to count
you can go ahead and have some fun and play around with colors too.
And then yellow-orange is going to be orange
so a lot of yellow.
And red-orange is going to be orange with a lot of red.
See? Easy!
I'll wash off my brush.
I'm going to get a little bit more yellow so that I can
work with the blue too.
What's fun is also one thing you're going to start to
notice too is when you mix all your
paint in this water reservoir is going to start
turning into a soupy kinda brown neutral color.
And that's an important thing to know too.
All the different colors together become
a really beautiful brown or neutral color.
So here I have
my blue and my yellow
So I'm going to go ahead and put my blue here
because my brush is already covered with blue
and
50% of blue and 50% yellow will be green.
So you need 50% of blue and 50% of yellow
to make green.
That's a nice pretty green.
And to make blue-green you just need a little bit more blue.
And you only need a touch really
of that blue to make that yellow-green.
What do you think? It looks pretty good.
Okay, our final color to make will be
the spectrum between red and blue, which will be
more of our purple colors.
So I'm just going to get a little bit more red
and get some little bit more blue too, just so I can
show those colors.
Okay, so I've got
my blue, and I got a little bit of red.
Go ahead and make kind of a purple color.
So here's our violet.
And I'll add a little bit more blue to it
to make a blue-violet.
And let's add a lot of red to make red-violet.
Looks pretty good.
The other thing that's really nice about the color wheel too is that it also
shows you the opposites, or the complementary colors
of each
of how each color works together, so,
let's take a closer look.
If I have my color wheel organized this way, what's
really neat is that it also shows you how
the complementary colors work between not only
the primary but all the secondary and tertiary colors as well.
So, automatically you know that red
is complementary to green
and maybe even more interestingly, blue-violet
is complementary to yellow-orange.
You might inherently see these in nature and say
"These colors look great together."
What's nice about this is not only can you do
experiments like our afterimage experiment, you can
also see how colors work well together.
So maybe you're looking at your interiors and trying
to design something.
Maybe you are putting your own clothes together and
trying to see why certain colors look well together.
This is an organizational tool to show you how
colors work well together.
But importantly too if you want to use this in your paintings, this will also inform
some choices about how different colors pair together.
So let's take a look at a little example.
So let's take a look at how maybe
using some of our knowledge about color theory or
color mixing in general can inform some painting that you do.
So lets do,
maybe we want make a red flower.
Just going to free-hand, just kind of maybe a red flower.
Okay
Well,
maybe I want to fill it in with something maybe
a little more dynamic.
So let's see if I want to add maybe some of that yellow.
And of course when we add that yellow in
we're going to get a little bit of orange.
These are colors that are relatively close to each
other on the color wheel so they're going to be
very warm,
and they're going to give us a little bit of a look like that.
Well, if I wanted to make a stem
color, and I know that
I made more less red-orange color,
most likely my stem in order to really
make it stand out should be more of a blue-green
color because these are complementary.
So let's go ahead and make that.
I have a little bit of blue-green left over from here
and we're going to use that to make
our stem.
So as you can tell, some of these
complementary colors here work really well together.
Maybe you really want to make
a beautiful brown shadow color so it makes
a little bit more three dimensional.
A trick is rather than relying on a dark color
that you would have like a brown or a black
is that you can mix your neutral.
So if I have my red-orange color
and I'm mixing it with
my blue-green color
going to probably get like a soupy kind of
purpley looking color here.
Going to be kind of a dark color.
It sounds counter intuitive, you think
automatically when you think of shadows you think of
maybe using a black or gray color but really
adding just the complementary colors together
gives you that really nice dynamic.
Looking like shadow.
So that's just a small example about how you can use
color to inform some of your art and color choices.
Okay, let's do a quick discussion about shades and tints
so as I mentioned before you can
go ahead and actually make your own neutral but
you can also use black to make a shade.
So black to any color would make a shade.
And white to any color would make a tint.
And so if you like the color pink for example
pink is actually a tint of red
because you add white to red.
So I'm going to go ahead and do that.
Put some white and some black on my pallet.
What's important to note is that the same rules
apply when you add black
or white to any color, so for example
I add white to this orange color
it makes sort of like maybe a peachy tone.
And I add white to this white to this blue tone, make
like a light blue, those colors will still inherently be
complementary, so the same science works.
So let's add black to maybe this purple color.
This purple or violet and I've got shade now
of violet maybe I use.
Okay.
So really just the black
more common sense just mix anything darker in
terms of colors in our color wheel.
Maybe let's make pink.
And we'll add that too.
So just adds a whole different characteristic to it
and usually when you're painting you can just go
back and forth between the different colors that you have.
Just keeping those rules in mind of using
shades and tints and
complementary colors.
So hopefully you can use your color color wheel as
a tool to help inform your art
and also maybe make any choices for anything
related to decoration or anything related to color
in general.
This is a really fun way to help just examine
what you're looking at.
Keep in mind that color is back to science
with how your brain perceives things.
So I hope you had fun and enjoyed
looking at our color wheel.
I am going to show you how to
continue your learning on color theory by accessing
some different resources we have at the library.
The easiest thing to do is to go at our home page
at PlanoLibrary.org
and this is the look of our website here.
We have a handy little search box at the top.
Under "Search the Library" I went ahead and put in
"Color Theory".
I am going to go ahead and put search.
And what this is going to do is give you
access to different resources
we have on this topic from a variety of
different databases and resources.
At the top you're going to see "Login for Full Access"
and this will require your library card information
which I am going to go ahead and do.
And once it opens it up it is going to give you the
content that you have access to with your library card.
So by typing in "Color Theory"
I was able to get a research starter here
and this is basically an entry from
Salem Press Encyclopedia.
It is going to give you a little bit more information
regarding color theory and some of the science
that we discussed earlier.
If I go back
I could also
make my search a little more detailed.
Right now I've got a large number of results
so maybe I'm more interested in
a video.
I'll go ahead and filter by format
and I'll put video.
Right here at the top you can see that there is
a color theory and color and light resource
from the Great Courses
and this will give you a web link you can click
It will allow you to log in with your information
and you can watch it on your computer or if you
happen to have a smart TV or another app
method you can go ahead and look at Kanopy that way.
If you scroll down you can also do
"How to Paint" here's some basics on color theory
as well, it's another visual from Great Courses.
You can open up each
entry and get some more information but it also will
give you that web link as well.
So this is just another way you can find some more
information regarding color theory.
You can always filter by format.
You can look at specific magazines if you wish here.
If there's something you want that's a certain
publication date maybe you know about you can
always do that.
And
that's just another way to continue some learning
Well thank you for joining and I hope you had fun
mixing some colors with me.
Hopefully you have another tool that you can use
for your own art and your own interest.
If you are looking for other programs please check
out our website at PlanoLibrary.org
