Beyond Color Theory: Understanding the Interaction & Relativity of Color

1. Class Introduction: Hey, France. It's Chico. I'm so happy you could join me today for one of my favorite topics, you guessed it color. I hope you have a chance already to check out my previous lesson on how to design a color theory poster in Adobe Illustrator. If you haven't, I encourage you to go back and check it out. I touch on the basics of color theory and also give you some tips of tricks and working practically in Adobe Illustrator. So today, we're going to go a step beyond color theory, and we're going to talk about the interaction and relativity of color. It's really important to understand some basics of the interaction and relativity of color. I'm going to talk about different types of contrast in color. I'm going to talk about the quantity of color and color influence. And I can go on and on about so many other things. I love color so much that I actually have a signature course on color called color count. So if you don't know me, I'm Chico. I'm an artist, designer, and design educator. I have classes on Skillshare. I have my own membership called the Design Club, and I also teach my signature course once a year called color Camp. So let's get into the interaction and relativity of color. You see, it's really important to understand as a designer of any type, but especially surface pattern design, how colors relate to each other and how they interact. That's what I mean by the relativity of color. Now, to quote Joseph Albers, in visual perception, a color is almost never seen as it really is, as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art. You know, color changes. Color is very tricky. It actually lies to us. It's not an absolute. It's always changing. One color can be a chameleon of tiny little nuances when we start looking at it. There are so many principles that change the way that we see color. And it's really important that you take time to see and understand color in a bigger way beyond color theory, just in terms of matching and pairing colors in a basic way. There's so many other essential principles to understand that influence color and the way that color actually works when we put it into practice. Now, you probably understand some of the basics about RGB and CMYK and pantone and how they're all a little bit different and people obsessed, especially when they're new about I need to match my pantone color. I need to match my pantone color. I just want you to know right now that there is no such thing as exact match. You know, if you're printing something on the exact same surface, the same exact paper type, and with the same printer, and they're using the same pantom color, then you probably are going to have a pretty exact match. But beyond that, we really have to let go of designers about being so precious about trying to match color exactly, because color in our world manifests itself in so many different ways. You know, we start on a computer, which is RGB based, no matter what color profile you're working in, it's light based. There's light coming from the back that's illuminating that color. So even in the slightest nuance of that, you're never going to get that when you're doing CMYK or pant because there's a little bit of dip of color, you know, we lose some of that brightness that's just inherent that's coming from the light from behind. So it's really important to understand that when we see RGB and C MYK and Pantone, that they all have different color spectrums, and there's always going to be variants, and we just really need to accept that because you're going to beat yourself up trying to make a perfect exact color match. And I'll say it now, especially when you get into working with a POD site. So imagine you're working with spoonflower and you want to print an exact color, and you order the color map on spoon flour on a cotton fabric. But then you decide you want to print your fabric on a silk fabric. Well, when you get that silk fabric, it's not going to match the spoon flour swatch exactly because it's on a different material. And so these are the subtle things that can change the way that we see color. So my recommendation is, no matter what you're doing, that you always proof your color before you go into production. If you're making an art print, you know, doing a silk screen with a local printer, you go, you do a proof print. You approve the color. You make sure that ink looks the way that you want on the paper. If you're printing on spoon flour, you order your pattern printed on that fabric that you're actually going to print on. And if you're questioning it, then you might print it on multiple types of fabrics just to see the difference. So you always want to proof and check your color to make sure that it's going to look the way you want. Now when you get into licensing your work and working with a company, they're going to have specifications for you, you know, like, we want to use Pantone color or we're printing with CMIKO we prefer an RGB image. I've seen it all in my career. So there's all these different types of ways that you might be producing your work. But it's really important to understand those subtle nuances in the way that we perceive color and understand also, like, where you can give and, you know, let color go a different direction. For example, if I am using a pant color for a specific company, then that pantone, when I print in CMIK isn't going to look the same. And I might have to produce an ad in a magazine that I don't have the option of using that pantone color. So I have to be happy enough with a CMYK match of that, no matter what, because that's a limitation that I have to production. But now let's say we're going to do a billboard in Times Square, that's an RGB billboard. So now we need to get RGB color that matches that pantone color as much as possible. So there's all these different cross directions that you can work when it comes to color matching, and you have to just be forgiving of that, and it's okay. Also realize that when you do print something with like a POD site, that it's okay to change your colors in your file to make it work for the actual final production that you're doing. You might have specified a pantom color that isn't printing right with your RGB file on spoonflour and then you have to go and adjust that color to make it look like the way that you want it when you finally print it. So let's talk about some of the things that influence the way that we see color just on a very basic level, no matter what color we're looking at. 2. Factors That Influence How We See Color: One of the biggest influences on color is light. The way that we see color and the type of light that we're looking at that color. If we're looking at a paper swatch and I'm looking at it under sunlight versus incandescent light, or if I go into costco under fluorescent light, these colors are going to look totally different. And so it's important to understand the type of light you're looking at something in. Sunlight is the best light to match color, but you want to be in a little bit of an open kind of ambient light that has a really nice just open light to it. You don't want to have super harsh direct sunlight. But think about if you go into the sun, if you go in the morning, you're going to have a more blue, softer light. In the afternoon, your light's going to get warmer, and then it changes into the evening and then into the night. So that light source changes in that sense. It also changes in the sense if we're directly in the light or open ambient light, like I was saying. So there's all these different influences that we have, even if we're looking at the same swatch and you're trying to match color with somebody, you need to make sure that you're both on the same page looking at that under the same light. If I have a client in New York and I'm in LA, then I need to be able to say, Well, how are you looking at this? You know? Are you looking at this in this light or this type of light? We need to make sure that you understand what blue that I want and that you're in agreement with that. That's kind of the point of matching, right? So when I go to look at a paint swatch, for example, in, you know, any sort of hardware store, you'll notice that they have a special light above that section, and that's usually a daylight balanced light so that you have a nice sense of what that color looks like in sunlight. And if you go to a professional printer, they will have a daylight balanced booth that you can look at your paint swatches in under that specific sort of light. So you have the influence of light. Then we also have, you know, subjectivity, like, how do we personally see color? We have you know, biological reasons that we might have color blindness or we might see color with less depth or less contrast. So we have these biological reasons that we all see color differently. You know, we have our own individual perceptions and our environmental influences of the way that we grew up or experiences that we have with color. You know, like, for me, I can't do beige. I also am not fond of yellow. Like, those are really hard colors for me to work and I do see moments in my looking back in my design career where I might have used those colors sparingly for some specific reason. But really, when I think about color from my work, it's very vibrant. I usually work in the kind of blue to purple pink range a lot. I had an orange face, you know, but we all have these personal experiences with color. And so it's important to acknowledge that, too, the way when we're talking about color with somebody else and trying to get on the same page with a client or with a licensor who, you know, wants to have a color change in our color way or something. So it's important to be able to understand and understand where we're coming from and also understand where other people might be coming from with their perspective on color. Then material properties, like I was talking about with spoonflower. You know, if you prit something on a porous, material, a paper, for example, or a smooth paper, for example, and you print the exact same ink, they're going to be perceptually different. Even though it's the same ink, we're going to perceive it differently because one's reflecting light. And bouncing light off through the color, and the other paper is absorbing. And it's absorbed the ink, as well. So one, the inks sitting on top of the paper and one the inks absorbing into the paper. The same thing if you print something on spoonflower, if you have a more rough fabric, your colors will bleed a little bit more, and you'll have less sort of detail in your work. But those colors will kind of bleed into the fabric, whereas if you print on a very smooth, kind of silky fabric and spoon flour, you'll see that it's really smooth. So the ways the ink lay on the paper also influences the way the color and the light interact with each other. So that's why, for example, in Pantone, they have a coded book and uncoated book. You'll see the letter C or the letter U after a color. And that's what it means. Coated is for coded, smooth paper, glossy paper, and uncoated is for rough textured uncoated paper. And they've adjusted the inks themselves to be perceptually the closest as possible when printed on these two different substrates. So it's important to understand that as well. And then, you know, we have besides our personal just experiences, you know, we have our mood at the time, and how we feel about color in a strong way sometimes, like I was saying, like, I have a response to yellow that I don't know why I don't like it that much, but I use it very sartly in my work, and I approach it very much with, like, Mm, I don't know, maybe for the right thing, you know? And that's okay. And that also helps you as you choose your colors, whether they're more pastel or more subdued or more neutral or more bold and more vibrant. That helps you develop your color story for your personal brand in this sense, as an artist that helps you develop your signature style. So it's important to understand all the different ways that we see, we feel color and how much color just thinking about one color as a swatch can change itself. Now, the most essential part of all this is how we start to now take color and use them together in our designs. So now we understand that one color can be affected by all these things so greatly. But now, how does color change when we pair it with another color? This is a whole nother type of interaction and relativity of color. How is one color relative to the other color? 3. Color Contrast, Quantity & Interaction: Mm hmm. So now we understand that one color can be affected by all these things so greatly. But now, how does color change when we pair it with another color? This is a whole nother type of interaction and relativity of color. How is one color relative to the other color? Purple and yellow are compliments, but one has a darker value and one has a lighter value. We talk about value in terms of brightness, so we have a lightness to it. We have a light color yellow and a dark color, violet. And when we put these two colors yellow and violet together, we have several different types of contrasts happening. We're having a complimentary contrast because they're complimentary colors. We're having a cool and warm contrast because yellows a warm color, and purple violet is a cool color. And then we're having a contrast a value because yellow has a higher value. It's brighter in it's like clarity of color. And then Violet is darker. It's a darker value. Yellow might be somewhere on, like, the 20% kind of if we converted it to grayscale, 20% range, whereas violet could be somewhere down in the 70, 80% range, depending on, you know, how bright and dark they are, but we're looking at very contrasting values with these two colors. So we have multiple types of contrast that can happen when we start pairing colors together. So when we pair these colors together, there's multiple occurrences happen at once. We're getting different types of feelings because of these different levels of contrast that are happening. So it's really important to start to understand that. It's not just about picking pretty colors that you like or colors from a photo kind of randomly, that you think, Oh, these are beautiful colors. It's really understanding how they work together and they create harmonies with each other when we think about color theory, but then they create interactions with each other. When we go beyond that, they create contrast of different forms. So it's important to understand how valuable the pairing of colors is. And then when we start extending that into a palette into creating a bigger family of colors, that they all interact together in different ways, just like a regular family. But they all need to get along in the big picture. And so it's really important to understand those individual interactions with color and what happens with them, the different occurrences. We have different types of contrast. We have contrasts of value, light and dark. We have contrast of hue, but different actual color, the contrast, that makes a contrast. We have contrast of warm and cool, and then we have complimentary contrast. We have the contrast of complementary colors, and we also have contrast of saturation. How much chroma, how much color is in a color? Now, that gets more nuanced and people often get this confused with value because they're very closely related, but it's really understanding when you see something that the way I can describe it it feels acidy, it feels hot in a design often means that the saturation is just pushed up too much and there's too much pure color compared to everything else. There's all these different types of contrast that happen when we start pairing colors together. So you always want to be aware of how do the contrast work? Is there enough contrast? What is the contrast coming from? A lot of people always think about black and white as contrast, but now that you understand that there's multiple types of contrast, you can now start to analyze your work, and when it feels too busy, start to understand does it feel too busy 'cause there's too much contrast happening on too many levels? Is there too much contrast of saturation? Is there too much contrast of warm and cool? Like, how can you separate some of these things? For example, if you make a background layer in your pattern, everything in the background feel cool, you can separate it from the foreground elements by making the foreground elements warm. So that's the way that you can use that type of contrast to your benefit. So there's all different sorts of ways that you can use, you know, contrast in your work. And remember that, the way we see and perceive color is always relative to where it's placed and what it's placed with and what's next to. So let's think about the quantity of color. And what I mean by that is that in art and design, quantity, the amount of color that you use in something is actually a quality of the work. It's one of the qualities of art. If I create a painting, let's say, a cityscape and everything's all gray and I have asphalt and buildings and sidewalks and everything feels gray and muted. But then I have one cone, one of those orange hazard cones in the street, and it's fluorescent orange. When I look at that whole painting, no matter how big it is, my eye will always be drawn to that fluorescent cone. That's because I only need a little bit of fluorescent to balance against something so dramatic, my eye will be drawn to that neon point. So understanding the quantity that you use in your work is really important. If I go out and I'm wearing a purple suit and I have a hot pink tie, everyone's gonna notice my hot pink tie, and they're gonna say, Oh, it looks so good with the purple suit. If I wear a pink shirt and a pink suit, everybody's gonna say, Look at that guy in pink and not acknowledge my hot pink tut. Understanding the quantity in your work also helps you understand what's important in a pattern, but also what's important in your collection as a whole and how to make better harmony between your collections. So, for example, something I see often with novice pattern designers is they will take a pattern, let's say their hero print. And in that hero print, there'll be like a tiny little accent color. You know, let's say a little bright blue. And their patterns maybe are mostly pink and warm colors, and everything feels very harmonious in their pattern. But then they'll do a blender print and they'll bring that little tiny accent bright blue into a full background of the blender print. And then it's like, Whoa, when you look at the whole collection, all you see is that big bright blue spot. And though it matches, you know, it echoes back in a very small way. There's a very small thread that connects it back to the hero print because, yeah, that blues in there. But there's not enough of that blue used in quantity throughout the other patterns to anchor that blue so that that big amount of blue holds with everything else. And sometimes that can be a good thing if you're using it in just the right way to make a really big kind of bold compliment statement, that can work in a collection. Wow. But it's really understanding the nuance of when you're doing it purposefully and intentionally, against kind of making an accident and making it feel like, Does that feel right? Sort of moment. So, understanding the quantity in your work is really important. So let's take our example of violet and yellow again and think about how they relate to each other in terms of quantity. Most people would think if I said, give me equal amounts of violet and yellow, they would give me this a 50 50 split. But really, when we look at how vibrant the yellow is, it almost overpowers the violet. It's almost like we're really seeing this so in order to counter that, we need to make the yellow less because of its vibrancy, it's really kind of outshouding the purple. And so in order to make it feel more equal to the purple, there needs to be less of it, and then it starts to feel more balanced. So there's a visual balance that you're looking for in terms of quantity when you're thinking about color. You always want to keep that in mind. Let's take one last look at some other examples of other complimentary colors. So if we put red and green in the checkerboard pattern, you can see that the pattern feels pretty stagnant and neutral. It's kind of not going anywhere, and it's not too exciting. But when we use red in a smaller quantity on a green field, the red becomes more active and it creates more movement and more energy and bounces due to the spatial qualities, but also the quantity of color. And lastly, we have the influence of color. Color, how they really influence each other. We've seen how the contrast works, but what happens when colors that are close in value or also far in value or have differences in hue, but slightly similar. What happens when they're surrounded by other colors? How do those colors have influence on them? You know, often when I see surface pattern designers, I'll see them pick colors that are very close in value or very close in value in Chroma, and those usually create buzzing. Especially if they're complimentary colors. So now we have too many contrast happening, but also too many things that are similar happening, and it creates buzzing. So we have that effect that happens, but it also happens with our eyes naturally, you know, if we look at a color for too long, it can create influence the way we see other colors around it. The quantity of color if something is very small, and let's say it's pink surrounded by purple, that pink might start to bleed into the purple because our eyes can't see the difference. We can't understand the subtlety of that difference because there's not enough quantity there. So as we start to pair colors together, but then use them bigger in an interactive way where they're actually embedded in patterns and surrounded by motifs, then we have to start to understand how do all those levels of contrast work. You know, first, we're having our eyes playing tricks on us. So let's take a quick look at some of the things that colors do. 4. Color Influence & Optical Illusions: So let's take a quick look at some of the things that colors do while we understand how a color can just influence itself and then how they can influence each other. Let's play some tricks. I want you to stare at the center dot, the tiny little black dot on the left hand side in the middle of the red circle for 30 seconds. And when I say stop, I want you to immediately shift your attention to the circle on the right and stare at the center dot there. And. Okay, stop and look at the dot on the right. What's happening? What are you starting to see? It's pretty amazing, right? You're starting to see an after image of the complimentary color. Colors are always playing tricks on our eyes, even when they're not there, they exist. So when you're seeing a color in your pattern and you shift your eyes over to another pattern in your collection and something looks off, what's happening? Is there some sort of effect happening like this? Now, understanding the interdependence of color can go another step further. Let's take a look at this image. I want you to do the same thing. Stare at this image on the left for 30 seconds. And when I say stop, I want you to shift your attention over to the square on the right. Okay, stop and look at the spur on the right. As you stare at that, what are you seeing as your after image? Are you seeing a contrast reversal? Instead of seeing the complimentary color this time, are you seeing the negative space as positive effects? This is how powerful the effects of color can be. Let me show you a few more tricks. Let's compare these two squares. Look at the image of the white square on the left and the black square on the right. The white square appears to be larger. That's because the white is bleeding over optically, where the black square appears to strict or get smaller. And that is something optically, even though these are the exact same size. The way we use color can change the way we perceive it or can change the way that motifs are interacting with the image. This is really important to remember when you're designing surface patterns and you start flipping and flopping colors. Not only are you just changing the color, but you might be changing the way that they're interacting with the space. Let's take a look at these two squares, for example. Compare the colors on the right and the left in the two center squares. They look the same, right? But when we compare them without the background colors, we can see that they're factually different. Why are we perceiving these color changes so significantly? This has to do with all the things that we learned in color theory, how complementary colors interact with each other, how value interacts with each other. When we start to put these ideas together, they can greatly change the way colors interact. Alright, so you can see that there are some crazy things that happen when we're just looking and observing color. Once again, you're starting to understand how relative color is and all the influence of the ways that we look at color and the things that might be happening in our patterns that are happening when you kind of don't understand when something doesn't feel right, you can start to see where you might be able to make some corrections and find some more subtlety in your work or create more contrast when necessary in your work. So let's take a look at a few examples now of color influence and what happens when we start to pair two colors together in a bigger way and the sorts of optical illusions that they can create on the way that we perceive color. Let's take a look at these two colors on reverse grounds. Now, you can see that we have two Xs here, and I want you to stare at the center of the screen right at where the boundary is, where the two fields meet. And when you look at that, you could see that these two Xs almost appear to represent the background of the opposite side. But in fact, when you look at the top, you can see that they're connected and they're the exact same color. This shows how powerful color can influence each other. That this factual color that's the same appears different because of the way that we've used the backgrounds and the backgrounds that we've juxtapose them against. Now, you can see here looking at these two squares in the center. They look very different. One on a violet background and one on a brown background. The violet one almost starts to appear a little bit orange, and the two colors around them are influencing them and changing the identity. The identity of this color is being lost because of the way it's being used by the background fields of these two different colors. Here in this example, I want you to stare at the center boundary between the two fields of background color. And you're going to notice that these two squares in the center now seem very much alike. But we can see that they're actually very different colors. So we're getting the opposite effect from the example before. In this demonstration, I want you to also stare at the center line. You can see that these two diagonals appear to be very similar or almost alike. But now let's see what happens when we reverse these colors in their fields. We can see that they're very, very different and very, very high contrast now, depending on how we use these colors on their background fields. So this is something very important to keep in mind with choosing colors for your collections and how you put them together. In this example, I first want you to look at the two light gray squares on the right hand side. We have one in the center and one below it. You can see that these are both the same color. They're both on a white field, and they appear to be the same. Now, across from it, we have another gray square, which appears to be similar to the gray square that we're looking at on the white field. Look down at the bottom again at the light gray square and the black color square next to it, it appears to be the color of the large black field. However, that gray square is the color of the center small gray square in the large black field. When we put them together now, we're increasing the contrast between these two. The two smaller squares at the bottom. And so it's changing the perception of the color of that black. It's changing the way we perceive that value because of the way it's used in amount and quantity and the way it's surrounded by other colors. This is how colors influence each other. Okay, I think you can understand by now that the way that we perceive color can be influenced by so many different things. And that's why it's really important to start to understand little by little the different sorts of actions that you're taking in your work with your color. Are you using vibrant colors? Are you using muted colors? Is there enough contrast? Is there not enough contrast and start making decisions about your work based on some of these principles. 5. Wrap Up & Put Into Practice: Now, we all have a different comfort level with color, and it takes practice and years to become very comfortable and almost immediate in your response with color. But it will come, and the more you put it into practice and the bigger decisions that you start making for yourself and about your work, the more you'll start to find your signature style, the more you'll be creating better patterns and better collections that feel more harmonious together. And you'll be getting more work license because things start to make sense, and it feels like that your collection belongs together because all your colors, all your patterns are singing together in harmony, and that's what we're looking for when we're looking for a beautiful, successful collection. So I can't wait to see how you put this into practice. I would love for you to pick one of your patterns or one of your collections. And take a look at it based on some of these thoughts, make some adjustments to your work and post the before and the after in the community so that we can see how you're starting to look at color differently, maybe find some improvements that you can make in your patterns and your collections, and then we can give you more feedback because I love to see your work, and you know that I love giving you feedback. Thank you so much for being here with me today. It's been so great to talk to you about color. If you want to learn more with me, I encourage you to check out my Instagram at studio dot Chicov and get on my newsletter and join me in color camp. I'd love to see you there and help you get more confidence in your color for your designs. Thanks again. I'm Chico, and I'll see you soon.