Practical Color Theory and Exercises

1. Introduction: Welcome to this class about color theory and exercises. In this course, you will learn characteristics of color, how colors change their appearance, the theory, and workflow of color matching, and we'll do all this through various value and color matching exercises. My name is Mandar a fine artist and a sculptor. I will be leading you through this course. One of the major challenge which painting students face is mixing appropriate colors for their paintings. If mixing right colors is a challenge for you, you are not alone and you are here in the right company. I've designed the course for the artist in you who wants to improve your knowledge and expertise about color mixing. By the end of this course, you will know all the necessary theory behind color mixing, but more than that, you will find out what exercises to do to gain color mixing mastery. I've simplified the technical terms while explaining the theory and have used a limited number of colors to do all the exercises. You don't need a lot of material to gain from this class, and this will also save you money when you will know how to mix just about any color from a very basic set of colors. Color theory remains the same irrespective of which art medium you use. This course is not just for oil painters, but for all kinds of artists. This course is good for complete beginners as well as for the artists who have a few years of experience. Even if you have never had any artistic experience, you will gain a lot from this course. Digital artists or even those who are just curious about colors will find this course very dewarding. Join this class and start your journey towards color mastery. See you inside the class. 2. Color is Relative: Welcome to the lecture. In this lecture, we'll be talking about how color of any object is not a constant and how it changes its appearance when the light falling on it changes, or the color surrounding it also change. To show you how color of light affects the color of object, I photographed this setup with three apples and a pair. This photograph is taken in daylight and this photograph is taken in fluorescent light. You can see that this photograph has yellow cast, whereas this has a blue cast. You can see how the color of the same pair looks much more yellow here, whereas it looks much more bluish here. To make this difference very obvious, I'm going to select this pair from here. And I'm going to bring it into this photograph which is taken in fluorescent lighting. You can see how the color of the pair has changed with the light falling on it. Now the second parameter that affects any color is the colors surrounding that object. To explain that to you, I'm using a website called E choc and I'm going to show you this checker design. Which was created by Professor Adelson from MIT in 1995. The idea is that the square marked A and the square marked B have the same color. Don't believe it. Let me bring this swatch of color next to this B square. You can see the gray color is matching. Now if I take that same swatch to color A, the color again matches. This difference is occurring because the squares surrounding B have a different color than the squares surrounding A. To make this more obvious, I'm going to toggle the mask and now you can very clearly see that the square marked A and square mark B have exactly same color. How do you use this knowledge of color not being a constant while you are actually painting something? Suppose you are painting this setup in a daylight setting. Then your color of the pair will be much more yellower than if you are painting the same setup in fluorescent lighting. This is the same reason why even the landscape looks different during morning hours versus late evening when the light is much more yellow orange. By wearing the color of objects, we can suggest different times of the day. This is very important when you are painting any landscape. In the next lecture, we will be looking at how we can describe color and what are the characteristics that define the color. See you there. 3. Charactiristics Of Color: Welcome to this lecture. In this lecture, let's talk about three characteristics of color. They are U value, and chroma. U in simple word means color or in Layman's language, U stands for color. Red is a orange is a yellow is a green, blue and purple are all Us. Then comes value. Value is relative lightness or darkness of a color. For example, if we take this blue strip, this is a dark value blue, and this is the light value blue, and there are so many steps in between. If you talk about these two, then this is darker than this and so on. Then comes the chroma. Chroma is how saturated is the color. You can notice that this is a blue, this is a blue, this is a blue, and even this is a blue, but this is a gray. When you add gray to a high chroma color, the saturation reduces and you get less saturated blue, even lesser and lesser saturated blue. We will be using these characteristics of the color and we will do some exercises, and finally, we will go on to how you match a color, what you see in real life for your painting. Thank you and see you in the next lecture. 4. Value Exercise 1: Welcome to this lecture. In this lecture, we'll be looking at value exercises in more detail. In the last lecture, we talked about three characteristics of color and value was one of them. In any painting, if the values of different shapes in a painting are correct, then you and chroma can be a bit off and still the painting looks good. In fact, black and white photographs and paintings are the best example of the importance of correct value structure. You can see the photographs on this iPad right now. These two are photographs and these two are black and white convergence of my colored paintings. You can recognize these objects in spite of the fact that there is no color in it. Now let's look at the first exercise in values. What we have to do is take a tube color and then grade it down or make it faint by adding white in it, and then we have to make seven values from it. What I've done here is I'm using a glass palette. I have the darkest color from the tube which in this case, I'm using ultramarine blue as the color from which I'll be making the values color. Beyond which there'll be only white. I place these at the two ends and I'm using a glass palette, I'll be using a palette knife to mix these colors because if you use the brushes never get very clean as clean as a palette knife and then there is a chance of one value getting mixed with another. Then what I have here is oil paper and on top of that, I've pasted this masking tape and created a grid for me to place the values here. The idea is to mix seven steps between this and this. This will be two and there'll be five in between. First, make the central value, which will be halfway between the darkest and the lightest. It all comes with practice that you have to first judge if this value is exactly at the center between this and this. We can of course go on adjusting the values later. But if we get it right for the first time, there's nothing like. I think I'll add some more blue in it, and I'll consider this as the central value and start with it. But what we need to do is I'll be using this value or this color in these two plus these two values. I have to have a bigger pile of this color. I'll be taking more of this blue color. I'm not worried about replenishing this value here. I'll get it from the tube and I'll add this value or I'll add some white to start with, and I'll make this central value. I'll replenish the darkest color here. And I'm fairly confident that this is the central value between this extreme and this extreme. Now what I'll do is I'll go on mixing two more values here and two more values here. I'm taking some amount of this color and I'll be making this value. I'll need more of this because I'll be using this as a starting point for this color. I goes some more dark blue. And the tricky part in making this value study is that the jump between these two values or jump between consecutive values should be uniform from here to here. It's tough to achieve in the first go, but you will get a hang of it once you do this exercise once or twice. There'll be one more value here. I'm checking if this is good enough to be here or it needs to be slightly more darker. I think I'll make it a bit more darker. I think I'm okay with this. I'll be using this color as the starting point here, and then I'll add Again, this value has to be central to these two or in between these two. Now what I'm thinking is these values are lighter than they should be. I'll be adding some color from here to here so that this becomes darker. When you spread out color like this, it becomes easier to see the value here. I'll be adding some amount of this color into this. Now, I'll start making these two values. I'm starting with this and I'll be adding this latest value. I think this is good enough, and now I'll take this value and add more of this color into it. I think this can be slightly more lighter. I'm adding some more white or more of this color. It's not exactly white. And now I can see that I've achieved fairly equal steps between or the lightness increases by equal amounts from here till here. Now what remains is that I'll have to apply these colors into this grid. Since I have my palette in this color already, I'm taking the color like this, not like this because I have to apply it this way. This will be the value which will go here. So this is the value which will go in the first one first square, then the second value will go here. I'm applying that color here. I'll slightly shift the camera so that you can see this correctly. Yes. This is good. Now I'll start applying the colors in these squares and the importance is in applying the color evenly. If there are ups and downs in this color, then it won't look nice when it dries. I'm cleaning the palette knife in between because now I don't want the values to get mixed up. I'm taking this first color and applying it here. I'm making it as smooth as possible. Now comes the third value. You have to take care that you don't accidentally pull color from one area into another. One, two, three, now this value. Then comes this and the second darkest. Now I'll be applying the darkest color which is directly from the tube. That's it. Now you can see that these are seven values of the ultramarine blue, which I selected and you should do this exercise for as many colors as you can because this will give you the confidence of creating gradation of the same color and this is very important in creating form in a painting. Suppose you are painting a ball using a singular color, then all these values will make your job very easy to paint them. I've taken a photograph of this and then converted it into a black and white image you can see that this is the darkest value and this is the lightest value and all these values are in between. That's it for this lecture. In the next lecture, we'll do another exercise for values. See you there. 5. Value Exercise 2: Welcome to this lecture. In the previous lecture, we mixed various values from this darkest dark, which is the ultramarine blue and we went on adding white to make different value steps. In this lecture, we'll be doing one exercise of painting a sphere with these values. What I'm doing is I'll be drawing a sphere here and I'll be using that as the reference for my painting. Assuming that the light is coming from here, so there'll be lightest light area here and the darkest dark will be on this side. I'm shading this sphere. I'm not being too precise about the shading, but I just want to indicate where the darks will be and how the gradation will happen. Then the darkest shadow part will be here just below the sphere, and it will go on becoming lighter and lighter as the shadow moves away from the sphere. I'll just use this eraser to highlight, create the highlight. Sorry for that. The gradations in this sphere are coming very nice. Because the paper is textured, it is not creating smooth gradation. But anyway, I'm using this only as a reference. Even the edge will be lighter on this side. You get the idea. Now we'll start painting a sphere here using the values given here. I brought in a brush and using that we'll be applying these values to create this sphere. In the last lecture, I told you that value differences are used in creating the form. We'll be trying to indicate the form of this sphere. Even if this is a two D image, the use of values will give it a form and it will make it look like a three D sphere. Let's start with the darkest dark, which is the shadow color. And I'll be painting this sphere slightly bigger just for the ease of it. This is the shadow part. Will try not to mix or merge the values as much as possible. I'll try to keep them separate. Now I'll use the second value. Then the third. The next Right. Don't go like this. The next value will be just around the highlight, and I'll be using this as the highlight color. I could have used white also, but I don't want to do that. I want to show you just the and I'll similarly do the same thing for the shadow. This is the second value. Because the shadow area is very small, I'll skip one or two values in between and notice that I'm not mixing the values, I'm just laying them next to each other. There you have it. It's a sphere painted with different values. I've not even merged them, but they look very continuous. If you increase the number of values, instead of seven, if you use nine or 12, beyond nine, it's really difficult to get those number of values in our paints. But if you increase the values, you can see that you will make the sphere very uniformly curving. We can achieve that effect to some extent by merging these values with a plain brush I'm using I have no color on my brush. I'm just dragging the brush on the areas where one value meets the other. Now you can see that the gradation is becoming much more smoother. That's because the two values are getting mixed and then they're creating an intermediate value. There'll be some reflected light on this side. And now that sphere is smoother has even more smoother gradations. I'm just applying some more color so that wherever the color had gone off because the brush had picked it up. I just lifted it. Just as a last thing, I'll add pure white here. As the highlight and you can see that the sphere becomes even more lively. This is how you use values in your actual painting and practice of creating different values will give you the confidence of creating the form in the way that's appropriate for realistic painting. Thank you and see you in the next lecture. 6. Theory about Color Matching: Welcome to this lecture. In this lecture, we are going to talk about the colors which we are going to use for our color matching exercises in the next chapter. We'll also discuss how we can use these few colors, the three primaries, brown and white and create different colors. Imagine that we have to match this color, so we have to mix a color which is same as this. The first thing is to inspect what the color is or the target color is, then choose a color which is very close to this from these by which I mean, this is not closer to blue. This is not closer to red, this is not closer to yellow. Neither it is closer to white. It is most close to this brown color. We want to choose this as the starting point. Then we will be matching the value of this color with the color which we are going to mix. First comes first, we inspect the target color, then we choose the nearest color which is available to us. In this case, it happens to be the brown. Then we match the value by mixing either white or yellow, as you can lighten a color only with these two, either white or yellow, and then we'll be matching the hue by asking questions like, it is the target color more red? Or is it more yellow or is it more blue? Accordingly, we'll add those colors into the mix that we are making. Then we'll adjust the chroma and chroma can be adjusted. Rather chroma can be reduced by adding a gray which is made by mixing that color plus its opposite color plus white. That means if I want to make a gray out of this red color, then what I'll do is I'll first make a green, which will be the compliment or on the opposite side of the color wheel. Then I'll add these two together and white to make a gray. And then I'll be adding different amounts of that into this color to have gray shades of this color. First, we match value, then we match, and then we match chroma. This will be much more clearer as we do the exercises in next lectures. But before that, there is one more thing which I want to add is that if you want to darken a color, there are two ways you can do that. You can either add blue to it or add brown to it. Though red also can do that, we generally use this as the darkening agent, then the pure red. Just to recap, in this lecture, we have talked about color mixing workflow, then how to lighten a color using white or yellow, how to darken a color using either blue or brown. And asking right questions about the color we are mixing versus the target color that is this target color more yellowish or more reddish or more bluish and accordingly, adding the color to it. Though this might sound very complex, it will be much more easier for you to understand when you go through the next lectures and practice accordingly. See you in the next lecture. 7. Color Matching Exercises 1 and 2: Welcome to this lecture. In this lecture, I'll be mixing three or four different colors or rather matching them with a sample color. This is the target color or sample color I've chosen. It's actually a book, but I've covered the rest of the printed area so that we can easily see the target color. I have four or five colors here. This is burnt sienna. This is cobalt blue. This is Alizarin crimson. This is chrome yellow and this is white, and I'll be mixing this color. As per the theory explained in the previous lecture, let's choose the starting point which is the color which is closest to this color from here. It's obvious that it's a blue, so I'll take some blue here. First thing we do is match the value of this color. To lighten this, we can either add yellow or white. But if we add yellow, it will turn into a green, which we don't want because this is a bluish color. We have to add white to it. Let's add white. Our first job in matching any color is to match the value, we need to add more white to it. Okay. And I'm going to do a rough check of how the value is. I'll just put it on a sheet of plexi or acetate and then bring it here. If you squint your eyes, you can reduce the amount of color and see what is the value. I think the value is very close though not perfect. But I can now go to the next step which is matching the color or the U. I can see that this is much more high chroma. Then this is a dull blue and this is a bright blue. There is what is the way to reduce the chroma of a color is to add opposite of it. Opposite color or complimentary color of blue is an orange. What I'll do is, I don't have orange here, I'll first make a small sample of orange with a little red and little yellow. This is a compliment. As I did not clean the palette knife, some of the blue also has gone into it, but I'm not worried about that. I'll take small amount of that and add it to. I'll add it very carefully so that I don't overshoot. I'm cleaning my palette knife and I will just mix this with whatever I had added already. I can still see that this is brighter than the target color, so I'll add some more of it. You can see that we are getting close. And you can see the difference. This was our color previously, and this is what we have mixed now. I'll just clean this acetate sheet again. Let's take this sample color and check it once more. You can still see that this is bright. I'll add a little more orange to it This is darker than this. I'll add a slight amount of white into it. Tiny bit more. I'll add a little bit of yellow, tiny bit. I'm cleaning the plexi. I think it still needs some more yellow, which was component of the orange which we mixed and some more white. I think we are very close. Let's check once again. Yes, we are almost there. There is a difference between how a printed material which is coated with plastic will look and how your all paint will look. But I can say that we are very close to the original color. You can see some darkness here because the plexi itself has some color and when you place it on the target color, it makes it darker, but you should only see at these two colors and they are close very close. That's it with one of the colors and let's now proceed to the second color which we want to mix. I'll just get rid of this color. Here is the second color which I want to mix and show it to you. This is as you can see, it's a green. But very yellowish green. The first step for us is to start with the closest color which is green. How do we make green is with some blue this is already very yellow, which is what I can see. I'm adding more of yellow to it. This is the base color. From here we'll start first we'll match the value. And as we know, we can make a color light with either yellow or white. We have already added yellow to it, so now we can add some white to it. Now let's see where is our value. Whether this is lighter or darker than the target color. Let's again use our plexi. I'm not worried about the color yet. In the first step, we only talk about the value. I can see that this color is slightly darker, so I'll add some more yellow because it is anyway yellower the target color is anyway yellower than the color which we have mixed. What I'll do is now I'll remove some color. And place it aside so that we can concentrate on the file which is remaining. Now I have added yellow to our existing mix. Remember we are matching the value first. I can still see that this is slightly darker, I'll add more yellow and some more white. Let's see what we get. You won't obviously do such precise color mixing when you're actually painting a painting. But then if you have practice of this, you can get very close to the target color or the color which you want to mix, very easily. This method is to study color mixing. We are very close in terms of value. Now what we have to ask ourselves is the target color more yellow than this? The answer is yes, we'll have to add more yellow to it. Let's see what happens. Obviously, adding yellow will lighten the color a bit, but let's not worry about that too much right now. This is the color. Now let me clean the plexi again and let me try with this knife itself. I think we have to add some more yellow. Let's now put it on the plexi. Let's check this. It is still the target color is still more yellow. We are very close. And I think we are almost there. Slight more yellow. As a final check, I'll clean the plexi and then have this color on this. We're almost there. I think some yellow and some white will do the trick. Yes, I'm happy with the result. You can see that these two colors are matching. Though with the video camera, you won't see the exact match because I see differently than what a video will see. But this color is very close to the target and that's it with the second color matching. Now I'll proceed to the third color which you want to mix. Remember, I've used only these four colors. It's not possible to mix every color with these four colors because some colors are too bright. For example, fluorescent greens or florescent yellows are not possible with these colors for that you need cube colors, but that color rarely comes in your realistic paintings. And if that comes, you can take a cube which is matching that color very close and then adjust it slightly to get the final color. But most of the colors can be produced using or mixed using these four colors. Now let's go to the third color matching. 8. Color Matching Exercises 3 and 4: Here is the third target color which we want to mix. As you can see, it's fairly easy color to mix. It's a pink, the closest what we have in the available colors is Alizarin crimson. We take a bit of that. I start with smaller quantities because anyway with color adjustment, the quantity goes on increase So we may not need a lot of experimentation in this, but our first goal is to match the value. You can see that we are very close with the first first attempt itself. At least now let me check the value though you might get a reflection in the palette knife, I can see it nicely and I think the value is matching, even the color is almost matching. But let's give the final try or do the final check with this acetate. Our color needs to be slightly more light. I'm adding slightly more white to it. I fear that we might have gone a bit too light, but let's check. I think we are on the mark and you can see that even the color is matching. We didn't have to add any of these colors because this is a high chroma color, we were able to mix just the primary and white to get this color. And that completes mixing of the third color and now let's go to the fourth color mixing. The fourth color that I want to match is this brown paper. This is a piece from a cardbound box, which is the closest color to this. I think the closest color is this burned sienna, but it's much more lighter than this. I'll add yellow to it because this is more yellowish. And you can see that we are very close, but our first step is to match the values. I want to now make this lighter so that to make it light, I'll have to add white to I think I went too light. Now to darken the color, what do we add as per what we learned previously, we can either add brown or blue to it. Now obviously you can see that this doesn't have any blue or this is more brown than blue, so I'll add more brown to it. I feel we should check the value now. Obviously, since the piece is small, I can bring it closer to this and I can see that this is much more darker. I'll have to add more burnt Ciena and let's see what happens. Now since this is a waste paper, I can apply some color to the plate itself. You can see that the value is nearly close or let's see the acetate itself. Let's see. The value is very close. Now I need to add just the color. I can see that this is more yellow. So I'll add some yellow to it. It's also less chromatic, or it's much more grayer. What's the way to make it gray here. What will make it gray is adding some blue. I'm adding some blue to it. Now let's check the value again. I'm cleaning the acetate and I'll add a new color to it. I can see that still this is bright or high chroma, and I want to bring it down, so I'll add more blue to it and also some white to it. I think it will need some more blue. You can see how less quantities I'm adding because it's easy to overshoot if you by mistake, add larger quantity. You can see that it's very, very close. But then I think this is slightly darker than this. What will make it dark is some blue and some brown. Some or blue. I think few more tweaks and we'll be there. Let's check this color first. Again, cleaning the acetate. We are almost there. We are there. Yes. Obviously, this has a different texture and this has different texture, so they won't look exact, but then the color is very, very close. That completes mixing of colors and see you in the next lecture. 9. Color Charts: Welcome to the lecture about color charts. This is one of the most effective colored exercises that dramatically improves your knowledge and practice about color mixing. What you see here is a photo of a color chart that I've done. It is basically an MDF or Masonite board primed with gesso, but you can use Canvas too. On top of that, I made a grid with masking tape. Now let me tell you how I made these colors. I took these 11 tube colors of various versions of yellow, red, browns and blues and created five step value scale for each of these colors. In this next set, I took the first color and mixed it into all these colors to get this color set. Then I made five value scale for all of them. In the following set, I took the second color and added it to all the tube colors to get the second base color set. Then I did a five value scale of these colors and so on. As we follow the sequence, this base set of colors is made by mixing this red into all the tube colors and these are their value scales. This whole process is laborious and tiring, but its rewards far overweigh the efforts. I urge you to do this charts with at least five to seven colors and see how it helps you. This is such an exercise that can and should be repeated at least once a year to keep your color knowledge sharp. That's it for this color charts lecture and it's time for you to make your own charts. Thank you.