Practical Color Theory: Everything you need to know for Art & Design

1. Welcome!: If you look at any field of art and design, you'll notice that color is a major factor from painting to fashion, photography, graphics design, illustration, logo design, abstract art, web design, interior design, even marketing in general. If there is one skill that you can master to make it in basically any of these, it's probably using color. Hi, I'm Duple. I'm an experienced artist and designer from Germany, and I'd like to welcome you to the color class, the ultimate course for using color in art and design. Say applying colors creatively is my specialty, and it has carried a good amount of my work. Over the years, I've done a lot of research on colors because I think it's fascinating what they can do. In this course, I want to share my practical approach to color theory and show you how you can apply it to any field that interests you, from the absolute basics to advanced techniques using tons of examples and clear explanations. You will learn how to use color psychology to achieve stunning effects, how to create color harmony, how to utilize color schemes, how to make your own color palettes for different situations, and how to avoid the most common color errors that I see everyone. I've worked very hard on this to include everything that you need, and finally put an end to the confusion when it comes to colors. With this course, you will develop a deep understanding of every main color and learn how to combine them to excel at anything related to art and design. And I would say you can heavily improve your marketing skills as well by understanding color theory, whether you're painting a picture, creating a website, designing a thumbnail or logo, making abstract art, or even editing a photo or color grading a video. Because at the core, it's really all the same. Once you know what color does and how you can use it to your advantage, you win. And with this course, I want to guide you there. Sounds good. Then see you in the first lesson. 2. Why Color Matters: Color matters because it's all we perceive when we open our eyes. I mean, what we see with our eyes is basically just a collection of different colors. So it's the first thing that you notice about any visual presentation, be it a logo, a website, a photo or whatever. Before you can read any text and before you can analyze or recognize shapes, your brain has already processed colors and made associations with them. Therefore, color is a major factor when it comes to brand recognition, probably even the most important one. It cannot be underestimated how much effort companies put into perfecting the precise colors of their logos and their brand design. They really care about it. Think of stuff like the bright yellow of McDonald's, the tetradic color scheme of Microsoft or the complimentary colors of Fanta. They are all internationally recognized. Think about it. If you want to buy a coke, do you read the text on every product in the shop and search for the white script that says Coca Cola? No, you ask yourself, where are the red cans? So owning a color scheme or even a color is one of the biggest achievements a brand can make because this gives you an insane amount of leverage for attention once people know about it. But obviously, not only big companies care about their colors. Every single artwork and design needs to have good colors because there too, it's the first thing that we notice. How you use colors in your artworks or designs matters a lot. It immediately makes a visual interesting or not in a split second. Unexciting or even uncomfortable colors are the fastest and one of the biggest turn offs for potential customers or viewers of your artworks and designs. So not knowing what colors do and which ones look good together can quickly lead to very unfortunate situations. And I'm telling you, every good artist and designer thinks a lot about colors when creating something because that's a very important step to make it look professional and honestly, to make it work in the first place. Not only knowing about color schemes and color harmonies and how to make them look good together is essential for art and design, but also being familiar with color psychology and having a complete understanding of the immense effects that each color can have. So, I'd say it's about time that you get really good at this stuff. Here is everything you need to know about colors for art and design. Let's go. 3. Color Basics: Alright. Before we dive into any of the real interesting stuff, we first got to clear up some definitions. I know, doesn't sound too exciting, but it's absolutely necessary because there are a few specific terms that people use when they talk about colors, and you definitely want to know them as an artist or designer in order to not appear completely incompetent. So let's start. First and foremost, what even is our color? Well, we humans are gifted with being able to see stuff by perceiving light with our eyes, which is very nice. We can differentiate between visual areas with our eyes because they have different colors that we can then process with our brains. This is how we identify almost all objects in life. Generally, there are three aspects that in combination, make such a visual appearance that we call a color. Those are hue, value and saturation. Let's start with hue. Hue is the type of color being determined by the wavelength of the light that hits your eye. I don't know how else to describe it to you than just, you know, green, blue, red, yellow, et cetera. You get it. When we talk about different colors, we actually mean hues most of the time. A hue in its purest form without any darkness or brightness or gray is known as chroma. This is a color at its maximum intensity. But because we can add darkness or brightness or gray, we have more options to describe a color, and that brings us to the next aspect. Value, value describes the darkness or brightness of a color. Starting from aroma, there are two ways to influence its value adding black to make it darker or adding white to make it brighter. The more you add, the more dark or bright it becomes. Simple as that. But there are actually terms for this. If you add black to a color, this new color is called shade. And if you add white, it's called tint. We can put the two together, and then we have the whole value range of a color. We have different shades then the chroma and then tints. All right. Value is very important in art and design. In fact, it's the main factor that makes something visible or not. If all parts of an image, for example, have simular values, it becomes very hard on the eye and it's difficult to spot different objects. You then have to use lots of different colors to make clear what's going on, which in turn can also lead to your image being hard to look at. So using different values to create contrast is crucial in both art and design. In fact, value is probably the best and most simple way to create contrast. When everything in a picture is bright, you look at that one part that is dark and vice versa. So a colors value is a very important thing to pay attention to. So far so good. But there is also the possibility to mix your color with gray, not darker, not brighter, just less of the color. By adding gray, you are lowering the saturation of a color and creating tones of it. Saturation is also known as intensity because the more saturation a color has, the more intense it appears, and the stronger its psychological effects are that we'll talk about later. And the more saturation a color has, the more visible it is. When all parts of an image are gray and desaturated, you look at that one part that has more color, naturally, which is a very useful thing to know in art and design. Alright, this is how color basically works and how you can describe it with different terms. And before you forget them, here's an example of me using these terms to describe an image so you can internalize them, and we have a little bit of context. So this is a digital painting sketch that I made about three years ago. What can we say about the colors based on what we know by now? Well, first of all, we have a variety of different values, which results in lots of contrast. We have white in the background, and then we have this black hair, black glasses, and black beard. Plus, we have some different values on the skin with shades of brown in the shadows and tints of brown in the highlights. So far so good. Then of course, we have a few different hues, red, green, and a few yellow and orange hues. And these yellow and orange hues are very desaturated, which means they have been transformed into tones that we know as brown and beige. Generally, the picture has relatively low intensity, which means that the colors are not very saturated, except of course, this red here, which appears in its chroma and therefore clearly stands out. All right, I think we got it all covered. You can have a nice overview of all these aspects if you open up a drawing software like Creta or Photoshop, and you make the color selector triangular, which is what I recommend. Here is the pure color or chroma at its maximum intensity. You can change the hue by sliding around on this wheel. You see, there are all the different hues, green, blue, red, pink, yellow, whatever. In any case, here is always black and here is always white. You can slide on this side to only get tints of a color, slide on that side to get shades of it and go straight through the middle to only change the saturation of a color and get different tones of it. Everything in between is a mixture of these simple aspects. This is how it works, and that's actually already it for color basics. It's not that complicated if you think about it, but the potential for using colors is huge, and that's what this course is about. So let's get started with exploring color on a deeper level. 4. The Color Wheel: In order to understand color and use it for color schemes and color palettes, you must first know how it is arranged and how different colors relate to each other. We're specifically talking about hue now. And you've certainly seen this before. You can model how the different hues connect using the color wheel. Now, the color wheel is actually not entirely correct because there are actually different color wheels with different purposes. For example, there is the RTB color wheel that is most common in drawing and design softwares to represent the color selector. Then there's the CMY color wheel which is used for printers, and there are even more that get crazy. These color wheels describe different ways in which colors can be mixed, but don't worry, that's not really important here. For art and design, we're going to use the classic RYB color wheel that is most common amongst artists and works very well to explain how color works. It's also the best for creating color schemes and color harmonies, in my opinion. That's what we're going to work with. And here it is the good old RYB or red, yellow, and blue color wheel. I'd say it's very likely that you've seen this before. The reason why it's called that way is because red, yellow, and blue are at the core of it. These are the so called primary colors. They cannot be created by mixing any other two colors on the color wheel, but they are the ones that are used to make all the others. So if you mix two primary colors, you get a so called secondary color. Mix blue with red, and you get purple, mix red and yellow, and you get orange and mix blue with yellow, and you get green. These are the three classic secondary colors. But as you can see, there are still gaps between the primary and secondary colors indicating that you can mix them once again. If you do that, you end up with the six so called tertiary colors, each created from one primary and one secondary color. Now, the cool thing about these tertiary colors is that you don't have to remember their names. There is a rather simple formula for finding them out. For example, the thing between yellow and orange is called yellow orange and the thing between blue and green is called, guess what? Blue green. Isn't that beautiful? You take a primary and a secondary color, combine them to get a new hue, and then you just combine their names to get the hues name. I wish everything could work that way, but, well, it's just the color wheel. It's a rather simple model. In real life, there are obviously way more different hues between the primary secondary and tertiary colors, and they are flowing into each other without any clear borders or something. The color wheel shows us the arrangement of the main hues that we've given names. And if you add tin shade and tone, there is a near infinite amount of possibilities for having a color. But this color wheel is a model that illustrates very well how hues basically work together and how we can mix them to create new ones. Of course, it's a crucial part to creating color schemes and color palettes, which we'll talk about later. That's nice and all, but what does color actually do? Let's find out in the next lesson. 5. Color Psychology: Color does a lot. No, ****. You are here because you know that it is important and you want to learn about it. But even still, color does probably more than you think right now, and you need to understand this. I've told you how we can associate colors with memories and how that makes color an incredibly important factor when it comes to stuff like brand recognition. You know that by now, but we're just getting started. The real deal is not that, but how different colors affect our psyche. Because every color has individual meanings that can evoke certain emotions, and those can be surprisingly strong. For example, the color of food can affect how it tastes. The color of a room can affect your mood and how you feel, and your favorite color can reveal something about your personality. And no before you say anything, collab psychology is not like magic crystals that have effects or something. This stuff has actually been proven scientifically over and over again, and all the big companies use it and spend money on optimizing their colors. So there has to be some application. Alright, now we got that out of the way. Let's start with the most basic example that I can think of for colab psychology, which is color temperature. If you look at the color wheel, you can pretty much split it into parts and divide it into warm colors and cold colors, which means if you have an image with many colors from this side of the color wheel, it will have a more warm feeling, and the temperature seems higher than if you used colors from the other side. Just observe how the mood of this image changes as I slide the hue back and forth between cold and warm. Sometimes I find it quite impressive how just changing the hue makes a scene look like it's in a totally different environment. That's why I always love playing around with hues after I finished an artwork or a design, just to see how it feels with different colors. Sometimes that's really interesting. But why is that? Well, it actually depends on the color, but it's either through evolution and instinct or through conditioning and experience in the world. Both is possible. Red, for instance, is usually more evolutionary. It evokes high alertness because we instinctively connect it with fire and blood. Purple, on the other hand, is a color that we often connect with royalty and luxury. But that's more because of society and our personal experience with how purple is used in the world. We could go more into depth here, but I would say the why of a color's meaning is less important than the what, because we as artists and designers are practical people and just want our colors to look nice and fitting. So I won't bother you with too much useless theory here. Don't worry. Just remember, color can have a strong psychological effect. And we're not just talking about warm and cold here. As an experiment in multiple prisons across a few countries including the US, Germany, and Switzerland, prison cells were painted in so called Baker Miller pink to calm down aggressive prisoners. Yep, you heard that right. The feminine appearance of pink evokes humility and that makes it hard to be enraged in its presence. And when prisoners were put into the pink cells, this actually worked. Well, prisons are pretty extreme places, and after about 15 to 30 minutes, other psychological factors outweighed the effects of the pink paint. The calming effects of Baker Miller pink are rather short term, which is why not every prison in the world has pink cells. But still, it's an impressive example for how color can affect our psyche and how that can be used in the most unexpected ways you can imagine. So by internalizing what different colors do, you can develop an intuition for using them effectively and efficiently, which is a powerful tool that you can use purposefully in art, design and marketing. So let's dive deep and explore the psychological effects of the ten main colors. 6. Understanding Blue: Let's start with everyone's favorite. Blue is the most popular color amongst humans, at least according to surveys. And for good reason, I mean, blue just looks nice. It's the natural color of the sky and the ocean. Blue generally stands for trust, reliability, calmness, loyalty, and coolness. So pictures and visuals with lots of blue seem a bit more slow and less energetic. This makes them feel relaxing and pleasing, but not necessarily boring. This is not everything, however, because blue is actually a pretty complex color, as I look at its different effects at different brightness levels can show us. For example, dark blue stands more for trust, dignity, intelligence, and authority, while bright or normal blues stands more for strength and cleanliness, and light blue, like the sky, symbolizes peace, spirituality, and infinity. It also has to be noted that the lack of dynamic energy that blue has can give it a sad and melancholic vibe, especially when used with low saturation. So if a subject in your artwork or design is supposed to feel that way, you can use tones of blue to support that. This works very well because the symbolism of blue is quite universal. As you can see, blue can have a variety of effects depending on how you use it. But the dominant feelings of trust, loyalty, and reliability make blue a super popular color for company logos, especially in banks and insurance companies that want you to trust them. You can often observe that they have a brand design, so their logos and their website that contains lots of blue or only blue. And this is also the case for technology companies and healthcare companies because you just want to seem reliable in these industries, and this is where blue comes into play. I mean, it's understandable because you can't really go wrong with this color. It's universally popular and accepted as something that just looks good as the global adoption of blue jeans and blue suits indicates, for instance, Blue works very well as a background color or as the basis for an artwork or a design because it's very calm and doesn't really get in the way accidentally as something like red or orange could. The only downside of using lots of blue that I can think of is that it's really hard to stand out with it because it's literally so popular. If you only want to evoke reliability, like this is classic and good, or if you just want to seem competent, then the chill color blue is a good choice. However, to grab a new viewer's attention or to make people notice your design amongst others, you will most likely have to do more than just use blue. Blue is probably not enough, so you will have to combine it with a more energetic color for contrast or use another color altogether. But combined with other colors, blue is definitely great, and it can unfold its potential as a super pleasing and popular color. 7. Understanding Red: Let's continue with red. Red is in many ways, the opposite of blue, not necessarily in terms of popularity. Red is also higher by the list, but more in terms of energy and emotion. Red is the natural color of fire and blood, so it evokes higher alertness on an evolutionary level, which makes it a very powerful color. Only yellow is even more attention grabbing and calls for higher alertness. Red is internationally used as the color for stop, and almost 80% of the world's nation's flags contain red, as well as many, many, many company logos. Interestingly, as the history of language shows, red is the most likely color to be described by any language right behind black and white, which are basically just darkness and brightness. As I've said, people really pay attention to red. And the symbolism of red is very strong, too, because it's pretty much the color of extremes and intensity, violence, love, danger, passion, anger, seduction, energy, and speed. Looking at these terms, you can probably already tell that when you have an artwork or a design with lots of red, it will feel very intense, either positively or negatively, depending on how you use it. With varying subjects and intentions, this intensity can apply to very different things, ranging from love to violence. So you got to be careful. When using red, context is very important. Also, when you choose the colors are rounded because red can have very different effects depending on that. When it's surrounded by black, it seems very powerful and almost seems to glow because of the high contrast. As opposed to white, where it's a bit more dull and even seems smaller than if you put it on black. And if you put it on a bright, saturated orange, it looks lifeless and almost cold, even though it's officially a warm color. So yeah, context plays a huge role for red, but in general, it definitely has very high energy. You can use that to make scenes or subjects pop or appear extreme. And in design, red is very useful to guide a viewer's attention and show them where to look. Now I don't only mean clickbait thumbnails here. Red is the call to action color, as you can tell by looking at most websites, buttons or links that people want you to click on are very often red. This color creates a sense of urgency and it can even induce appetite. This is why many fast food restaurants use red in their logos, too. But the power of red is so huge that it can be as tiring as it is attention grabbing, especially when used a lot and with high saturation. Red is often and easily overused, and it's just not nice to look at after some time. Imagine if all the walls in your house were painted with bright saturated red. I mean, I would probably go crazy pretty quickly. So red usually cannot be added as frequently and as easily as blue. With this in mind, always consider your usage of red carefully. Does it really fit the subject? Do you want the viewers attention to go there? And are you perhaps using a bit too much of it? Always ask yourself these questions when using the color red. My advice is have a clear purpose when you use red. Put red in places where you want action and attention and use it appropriately and precisely. Just don't use it too much and let it stand out amongst other colors to harvest its big energetic potential. 8. Understanding Yellow: Yellow. Yellow is the last classic primary color that we need to cover. It's a very interesting color because it has similar energetic and attention grabbing effects as red, but it's still totally different. Yellow has two sides. On one side, it obviously stands for warmth, friendliness, happiness, creativity, and optimism. It's naturally found in many flowers, and the fact that it's by far the brightest hue makes us associate yellow with the sun. That's also the reason why yellow is often the color for deity in religions, like in ancient Egypt or Hinduism. It's a super popular color for logos of brands that want to be seen. Yellow is often used by food companies, for instance, because it induces appetite or also as an eye catcher in newsfeeds if they don't want to seem super dramatic like with red, but still want your attention. That's a very smart use of yellow. On the other side, however, yellow can also stand for jealousy, egoism, betrayal, plus physical illness and caution. It's frequently used as a warning sign for stuff like toxic materials or danger or in traffic because of its high visibility. Again, the psychological effects of yellow strongly depend on the context in which you use it. But if you wanted to appear warm and friendly, absolutely make sure that you use it in a bright and especially saturated form. Unlike other colors that just get darker and sometimes a bit more intense when you decrease their value, yellow doesn't like darkness so much because it reacts very strongly to black and quickly fades to a muddy, green, brownish tone that doesn't look very welcoming and friendly anymore. One of the very few colors that you could pretty much describe as objectively ugly. There are no real dark yellows. This color literally wants to be bright and shining, so that's also how you want to use it most of the time. Here's another interesting use of yellow. When editing a visual scene, you can give it a slight overlay or filter with yellow and it immediately feels more warm and more comfortable. That's a very easy and common effect in movies that you can also use in art, for example. Use bits of yellow like light bulbs that you put somewhere. It's an excellent color for creating contrast, especially when used with darker colors like dark green, dark blue or black. That way, it looks pretty much always awesome. But as a main color, yellow is actually not used that often because it can be very tiring, just like red. Due to its high energy and attention grabbing effects, it's also very easily overused. So be careful. Always mind the context in which you use yellow. Use it carefully and purposefully, and I recommend you use it mainly as a small accent color. Pick the right subjects for yellow and the right amount of it and you can benefit from a variety of effects, ranging from happiness to physical illness. Let yellow be a bright accent to contrast other darker colors and it will stand out like nothing else. 9. Understanding Green: Moving on to green, we got the color of nature and growth. Green is another very popular color in branding for exactly that reason. If something is saturated with green, it looks fresh, natural, eco friendly, and it promises future growth, which is why it's also a popular color in the financial industry, and banks also like to use it in their logos, just like blue. Green is used in rising stock prices, green check marks, and green traffic lights that tell you that you're good to go. It looks fresh and clean, and it's also often used in the cleaning industry. The symbolism of green comes from plants, and we associate almost every object that's green with nature in one way or another. Why? Well, perhaps that's because literally everything in nature is green. Obviously, green is the color for eco friendliness and companies that produce organic food. It's mainstream in that regard, and you will have many competitors if you decide that your company that has something to do with nature shall have a green logo or website. But don't worry. That doesn't mean it's bad. Green is still often a good choice because it's just so fitting for this purpose, and there are many different versions of it. Aside from nature, green stands for hope, health, freshness, and prosperity, but also potentially envy and bordom. Generally, green comes in probably more variations than any other color. So green is not just green. It can be used in so many different ways with varying hues, tones, and values making a huge difference. Green looks more fresh and exciting and darker green looks more calm and grounded. If you use green with lower saturation, it will make anything look natural and base. Like it comes straight from nature. When used in a bright form and with high saturation, though, green can look surprisingly unnatural and toxic, like cheap plastic or something, but it depends on the subject. What's also interesting is Green's color temperature. As a mixture between the cold color blue and the warm colored yellow, it's neither warm nor cold. Its temperature strongly depends on its hue and the colors that you add are round. Green can look very cold if it's more on the blue side, but also very warm if there is more yellow in it. Pay attention to the color temperature if you use green. It can quickly shift and not have the desired effects. Green will always be your choice if you draw, paint or design something that has to do with nature. That's not going to change so quickly, but try mixing it with other colors in order to make your visuals stand out. Remember that green has many different variations, ranging from emerald and avocado to turquoise and the ocean. Green is a color that's truly worth experimenting with. 10. Understanding Orange: Orange, here we go, a very polarizing color. People tend to either love or hate it. Fun fact, the color orange is actually named after the fruit, so it's the only main color that got its name from an object, which is funny. But let's get to the point. Orange is the color for warmth as a mixture of red and yellow, that's pretty obvious and it also inherits some of the effects of red and yellow. Naturally, orange is found in fire and sunsets, flowers, fruit and vegetables, leaves in autumn, and sand. For that reason, orange looks not only hot but also healthy, which makes it a super popular color for food companies. You can see many, many food products use the color orange. Its general symbolism is energy, excitement, warmth, adventure, change, and vitality, which is generally really nice. But orange can also suggest a lack of discipline or a lack of serious intellectual values because the color is very free, loose, and energetic. Plus, there are also slight differences depending on the value of orange. Darker oranges can look spicy, earthy, and comforting, a bit like brown, while brighter oranges look a bit more soft but energetic, hot, and healthy, which is a quite interesting combination. So if you use orange in marketing, think about who you want to speak to. Notice that highly saturated orange can look cheap, but not necessarily in a bad sense, maybe just that it stands for a goodbye. Because of its high energy and looseness, orange also speaks to children pretty much internationally. Orange also has very high visibility, almost as high as yellow, which is also why it's often used as a warning and safety sign. You will pretty much always notice the orange bits in a picture, no matter what or how many other colors there are. Orange works excellently with its complimentary colors like dark, blue or green. So it doesn't look too hot and demanding. And if you combine orange with black, it pops even more and looks very intense, potentially even aggressive. But orange can also work very well as a background color if it's not super intense but more light and less saturated or very dark and less saturated. That works too. And that way, it will provide viewers of your work with warmth and comfort. Explore orange nuances. There is a huge variety of effects that it can have. If you use it well, you can create compelling artworks and designs that look exciting but comforting at the same time. 11. Understanding Purple: Next up, we got purple. Purple is a very interesting color because in nature, it is very rare. It's well possible that many of our prehistoric ancestors never saw a purple flower, bird or fruit, which is why even today, purple mainly symbolizes the supernatural rarity and being special. Purple has actually stayed rare for a long time, and the only known way to dye something purple used to be extracting it from literally thousands of shellfish for a single gram of purple dye, which is why only the absolute richest people could afford to wear it. In the Roman Empire, the color was, for some time, strictly reserved to be only worn by emperors or very wealthy and privileged individuals. Now, times have changed, of course, and purple is now all around us, but it's still heavily associated with luxury, royalty, and wealth. That's the main symbolism of purple for most people. But also purple stands for mystery, creativity, spirituality, imagination, and the subconscious. And just like orange, purple is a very polarizing color. So people tend to either love or hate it, and young people tend to like it more than old people. Notice that purple also has slightly different effects at different brightness levels. Light purples look more loose and lightheaded, while dark purples look more sophisticated and intellectual. The fact that purple is significantly more popular amongst the youth is something that you should keep in mind in marketing. Purple can make a brand design look expensive, luxurious, and intelligent. But speaking to a young audience at the same time, which is a quite interesting combination. With purple, however, you have to be careful. It can also stand for decadence and make a brand design seem stupid if there is lots of purple, but the product or website don't provide any significant value. So don't mess with purple. Only use it where you feel confident and your product or service can live up to the high expectations that this color induces. Like green, purple is a color that's neither completely warm nor cold. It just depends on whether it's more on the blue side or on the red side. Red obviously being more warm and blue being more cold. So pay attention to this. When you make a design or a painting with lots of purple, its color temperature is very sensitive, and you definitely want it to be right. Look at the subject and the theme of your image or design to decide in which direction you want to move with your purple. Purple, as the color with the highest wavelength on the light spectrum is a very powerful and intense color. So I recommend not overusing it, especially if you want to sell something. Remember that you can always use lower saturation or lower values to influence a color like purple and use it in moderation. That way, you can make it look professional without seeming decadent and you can profit from its powerful meanings. 12. Understanding Brown: Brown. Now, what does brown do here? Brown is not really a hue on the color wheel but it's more like a dark, desaturated version of orange and red. Well, brown is here simply because it has meaning. It doesn't need to be a specific hue to have specific effects because even though brown is a variation of orange and red, it has very different effects and meanings that you should be aware of when using it. Brown is one of the most common colors in nature. It instinctively makes us think of Earth and everything that comes from it, like tree stems, for example. That's why brown is like green, often used for designs of companies that produce organic food or brands that want to seem connected to nature. But brown doesn't look as healthy, fresh, and growth inducing as green. It's more grounded, down to earth, respectable and stabilizing. Brown evokes trust, and it stands for authenticity, dependability, and something that comes from nature. The color is very friendly and comforting, but it's not striking and signaling like red or orange. So it's an excellent choice for backgrounds rather than main subjects, which is also how it's used most of the time. Brown actually works very well with other colors and pretty much any of them because brown alone can be a bit boring, dull and predictable. It can even evoke loneliness because of its simplicity. Brown puts reality over fantasy. It doesn't really have intensity like most hues on the color wheel, even when used with higher saturation. Remember to use brown if you want to seem authentic with your brand or realistic with your painting, for instance. Don't forget to add other striking colors in contrast to brown, and it can unfold its potential as a super versatile baseline color. 13. Understanding Pink: Okay, pink. Before you ask, no, pink is not the same as purple. I know they look kind of similar. I mean, they're both hues between red and blue, but pink definitely has unique meanings and effects that I want to show you. Pink is basically red mixed with lots of white and a little bit of blue. So it's a bit more on the red side than purple, and it's usually quite a bit brighter. It basically ranges from salmon pink to berry pink, depending on how much red or purple there is in it. Generally, lighter and less saturated pinks are more soft and innocent and darker, more saturated pinks appear more intense and romantic, a bit like red. Either way, pink is heavily associated with the feminine. I don't think this comes as a surprise to you. However, there is a little bit more to it than just that. Pink inherits some of the energizing and compassionate effects of red, but through its mixture with white, it comes with way less intensity. It can even seem relaxing, calming and comforting because of that, which gives the color contrasting effects depending on how you use it and how you adjust the values and the saturation. In general, pink stands for compassion, love, femininity, playfulness, but also emotionality and immaturity. Pink is a very friendly color. It induces romance and warmth. That's why pink is often associated with sex. The big contrast of pink is that it somehow stands for innocence and intimacy at the same time. Don't ask me how that happened, but it certainly has something to do with the simultaneously friendly and timid wipes that pink gives. It's surely a weird color, and it's mainly used in marketing if a brand wants to speak to, well, girls, or if it wants to be seen as easygoing, casual, and youthful. Using darker and highly saturated pinks for larger areas of a design can make it very tiring to look at, as it's the case for all energetic hues. But brighter, less saturated pinks can be very useful for that and they can make something seem quite modern. Notice, however, that an overuse of pink can make a brand design seem cheap and careless. Try to think of pink as the brighter, more red version of purple that seems less deep, less serious, less expensive, and more playful, it works very well with countercolors, like green or blue to cob it down a little bit. And yeah, that's pretty much it for pink. Be aware of its varying effects and you've got another versatile tool to evoke strong emotions. 14. Understanding Black: Now black. Wait, is that really a color? I'm going to be honest. I don't know, and there is certainly a debate to be held whether or not black and white are actually colors because technically, they aren't is pretty much just the absence of any light and color, and white is the opposite. But guess what? They are something that you can add to an artwork or a design, and you can definitely see when something is black or white. So they have unique effects on the viewers that we should discuss here. So let's start with black. Black generally stands for power and intensity. Any color as you decrease its value will get more and more serious until you end up with black, which is the ultimate symbol for class. If something is black, it often looks big, intimidating and strong, and it exudes authority like no other color, which is why you see many, many black cars, for example, because people like to be seen that way. Our brand uses black in its logo or website if it wants to be seen as serious, elegant, and expensive. But black can also seem sad, depressing, and dominating. Because of its complete lack of light and hue, black doesn't shift in any direction on the color wheel, like cold or warm or energetic or relaxing. But black doesn't reveal anything. It's just there being strong and powerful without any bias or wipe. Black works excellently as a contrast to bright, striking colors, and it makes any of them more intense than they would be by nature. And this is the main reason why it's a super useful tool in art and design. The color black is one of the best ways to frame something or to direct the viewers attention somewhere. You can either use black for the focus point in a C or lighting color, which can make the subject seem powerful or even evil, or you can use it to surround our focus point, which makes the subject seem weak, helpless or also heroic. Black is an essential tool in art and design. You should not forget about its existence amongst all the interesting effects of different hues on the color wheel. How you use black in your painting, design or logo will influence a lot how it feels. The addition or removal of a black bit will always make a huge difference in your work, no matter what it is, and more than any other color. You will use black a lot as an artist or designer, no matter what your preferred style or mood is. So be careful with black. Black is not really a color, but more like a manipulation of color. It's a tool for contrast that you have to master in order to create awesome artworks and designs. Combine black with bright or saturated colors to create contrast, and you're pretty much guaranteed to have something that grabs attention. 15. Understanding White: Finishing off with the opposite of black, we got white. White light is the combination of all colored light. So this means white is not really a hue, but it's pretty much the definition of brightness. Any color as it gets brighter and brighter, fades to white. This makes white pretty much the baseline for most artworks or designs. It's the color of a blank canvas, blank paper, and it's the background color in pretty much every drawing and design software. White waits to be filled or combined with other colors. It's pure, innocent, neutral, and nice. So its symbolism is mainly peace, neutrality, and cleanliness. This makes it the most easy going and soft color out there. Look at toys and clothes for babies. They are often colored in pastel, which basically means any color mixed with lots of white. This makes any color soft and neutral, no matter its original meanings and effects. Now, is that all for white? Just nice and neutral? Of course not, white can also be used in a very different way to create striking visuals, heroic scenes, memorable artworks and lots of tension in our design. Think of the examples for using black from the last lesson, just the other way around. When everything is dark, you look at that one white part of an image, and when everything's white, you look at that one bit that's darker or colored. Because white is the definition of light, it is, along with black, the best color for creating contrast. I don't think this comes as a surprise. However, brands don't really use white as the main color in their logos or website because it's super neutral and not really attention grabbing or memorable. It has to be combined with other colors in order to work. So you can see that it's still part of many logos, but just used as contrast to make other colors pop even more or add it as tint to give other colors a bit more detail. So yeah, white may not be a real color, technically, but it's still an important part of most artworks and designs, and you can definitely use it to achieve psychological effects, either as an innocent basis or as a tool to create powerful contrast. So that's already it for the details of the most important colors that you must know. Now let's continue. 16. Color & Culture: Now you know quite a lot about the effects that different colors can have on viewers of your artworks and designs. Or do you? There is actually one important point that we should not forget about, and that has to do with where our associations with different colors come from. As I've told you, there are two main ways in which color can affect us based on instinct and evolution or based on what we've learned in society. And yeah, here's the thing. Societies around the world are quite different. Oh, no. So does that mean that the collab psychology that we've learned only applies to a few specific parts of the world? Don't worry. Not really. What I've told you so far are very universal associations that people make with colors because the symbolism of colors doesn't usually come from anywhere, obviously. The societal effects are often based on the evolutionary effects, which means that you can use what you've learned so far pretty well in most cases, and it will have the desired symbolism for most people on the planet. Red stands for energy, blue stands for relaxation, yellow stands for joy, and green stands for growth. This is pretty much the same all around the world, so you can count on these effects. However, there are some nuances that you must be aware of. Now, if you make art, the symbolism of your colors is probably way less important than whether or not they look nice and fitting. In art, you can mainly focus on color harmony and color palettes, which we'll talk about in depth later on. But specifically for brand and logo design, you have to get everything right. So I want to tell you something before we move on. You often have to deal with the fact that in different countries, colors can have different effects, which might have an impact on how your brand is perceived. So you got to watch out for that. In India and China, for example, red is a color that's typically used for weddings. While in South Africa, it stands for grief and mourning. And the color purple generally looks expensive in most countries, but it actually looks cheap in some others. And that's not everything. There are also differences for genders. Blue is the number one, most popular color for both men and women, but for number two, it's actually not so clear because men tend to prefer green and not like pink and purple as much, while for women, it's the other way around. Also, there are some studies showing that in some societies, including what we call the West, women are generally able to name and distinguish more different colors than men, which is quite interesting. It's also funny to look at which colors actually have names in different societies. While in Japan, blue and green have literally the same name. The inuit have 17 different names for shades of white. Yeah, because they spend basically all their life in the snow and they just describe different shades and tones of that snow with different words, which makes sense for them, but seems totally stupid to most people. That's a little fun fact that illustrates how different the perception of colors is in different societies. But not only culture and gender can play a role in our relationship with color. Age too is a thing that you have to watch out for. Young children generally prefer more intense and warm colors, which you can tell by looking at toys. They are usually bright, saturated and have warm hues. On the other hand, the older people get, the more likely they are to prefer calmer, colder and more classy colors. Also, people living in sunny climates like Africa, on average, prefer warmer and more saturated color palettes. While people in colder places like Scandinavia, prefer colors that are a bit more cool and neutral. Now, obviously, not every person that's part of a group acts like that group all the time. Not every Africans favorite color is red or yellow. Not all children only enjoy warm colors, and not all women are able to name more colors than the average man. These are just statistics and the results of many, many surveys and studies. Individual people often have their own taste, so you can't make sure that your artwork or design speaks to everybody in the same way and has exactly predictable effects. That's just impossible, unfortunately. But the statistics are still there, and they simply predict probabilities that are very useful for marketing. If you use a cool pastel color palette for a marketing campaign in Norway, not every single Norwegian will love it, but the probability that it works is statistically higher than if you went with a bright, saturated color palette, that one would probably have better chances in Africa, for example, or South America. Obviously, you should not just research the favorite color of your target audience and just use that. It also depends on the type of product you're selling, the brand image, your personal style, or preference, color psychology and stuff like that. These are all factors that you can and should take into account when you select colors for something. But what I'm trying to say here is that culture and the people who you want to speak to are also factors that can be very helpful in your decision making. It can be that crucial bit of extra information to perfect the color palette for a design, and many people forget about this, which is your competitive advantage. If you want to target a specific audience, use these group specific color effects to make your artwork or design look pleasing for that group specifically. By doing this, you can increase the probability of your message working and your colors looking great. That way, you're in many cases already far ahead of your competition. Color is a tool that may be tricky to handle sometimes, but it's always worth it investing time and research to get it right. Trust me, it will pay off. 17. Color Context: If you want to use color in any way, you must be aware of color context because colors can look very different depending on how you connect them. Not paying attention to this is probably one of the most common mistakes that artists and designers make when using color, and you don't want to be one of them, right? Here is what you need to know about color context. Whenever there are two or more colors next to each other, they influence how they look and how they feel, especially when they are quite similar. Take this pink right here, for example. If I place it on top of this blue spot right here, it looks warm and glowing because compared to the background color, it is. But now if I put exactly the same pink on a bunch of red, then it looks pretty cold and even a little bit desaturated, even though it's the exact same color. Or look at this red square put on different backgrounds. It looks striking and intense on black, a bit dull on white, brilliant and glowing on blue, and almost lifeless if you put it on orange. Here's the deal. Don't just think of colors as absolutes. Like this color is warm, that one is cold, this one looks happy, and that one looks sad. Yes, colors do have absolute meanings that you can rely on most of the time, but you should also consider a color's relative position to its surroundings, because depending on that, it can look very different, not just in terms of color temperature, but also in terms of visibility, intensity, value, and even the psychological effects that a color can have. Contrast is an important factor here. Let's take this strong, saturated and intense yellow and make a pattern where we mix it with an equally intense pink. Look at this. The whole thing doesn't look as strong anymore, but rather smooth and calming, even though the colors on their own are very energetic. Due to the lack of contrast, the colors can't really stand out and do their job, but they even seem to cancel each other out a little bit, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it just changes the effects that the colors have. This shows us that color context mainly plays a role if colors are close to each other on the color wheel and have similar value and saturation. Depending on the direction in which you move on the color wheel, when adding another color, it will have an according effect like this. When you have a blue, desaturated artwork that looks very cold and you add green and purple, then these two colors will look very warm, even though officially they are pretty neutral in terms of their color temperature. But compared to their surroundings, they now look pretty warm and glowing. But if we take colors that are further apart on the color wheel, they pretty much always look pure and intense because there is lots of contrast between them and they don't really interfere with each other. When colors are further away from each other, they don't really compete and each color can do its job. This green looks very green and this pink looks very pink. They don't cancel each other out, but instead, they even seem to strengthen each other, which you can, of course, use to your advantage. But more about that later when we talk about color schemes. Color context also plays a role for value. How you perceive the brightness of a color is dependent on the values of the colors around it. A very clear example of this is this line put over a transition from black to white. It almost looks like the line has a transition too, ranging from a brighter gray on the left to a darker gray on the right. But if I remove the background, we'll see that it's just 1 gray and we've been tricked by color context. Another funny thing is how our brain reacts when color is added or taken away. Look at this yellow screen and pause the video for about 20 to 30 seconds and don't look away during that time. And now, if I remove the yellow, it looks purple or blue, even though the screen is just white, your brain has gotten somewhat used to this yellow during the time you've looked at it. And once it's gone, everything looks like it's complimentary to yellow, which is this blue, purplish tone. So here is what you should remember. Whenever you add another color to an artwork or a design, think about the effects that this color would have, not just the absolute effects, like, is this a warm color? Does this color look bright and energetic, but also the relative effects. Is this color warmer, brighter or more or less energetic than the colors that are already there? And would that be fitting? Adding a tone of yellow to an image does not necessarily make it look more warm, as you can see here, even though it's officially a warm hue. Same thing with saturation and value. Always keep our colors context in mind and combine the absolute with the relative effects. That's how you do it. 18. Color Harmony: Now we're entering the core of this course, the really important stuff that you've been waiting for. Welcome to color harmony. Color harmony is the science, if you can call it that, of making colors look good together, which is quite useful like every time you use more than one color. So we're done with it. This color does this and that color does that, and we will now explore how to pick multiple colors for your work and how to ensure they don't suck. Let's go. The first rule of color harmony is to not use too many saturated colors at once. Like, please, this is the most classic beginner mistake that you see in every field of art or design. More is not always better. If you just spam colors and fill the whole image with supersaturated forms and shapes, you won't get more nice psychological effects from that. The only thing the viewers of your work will experience is a strong desire to look away. Colors generally work best when there is focus, a nice balance, and not too much going on at once so that each individual color can be noticed and do its job properly. And we'll talk about how to do that. Use color schemes, make a color palette, choose a few fitting colors, and stick with them. Having unrelated colors with high saturation everywhere is one of the quickest ways to make sure your visual looks awful. I'm sorry, that's just how it is. Now, does this mean you shouldn't make colorful pictures? Of course not, but it's way better to just focus on a few colors and picking them carefully based on a color scheme rather than adding them randomly. Or you can just make your colors desaturated so they don't burn in your eyes. That's also a way to make it work. But what if you do want to use many colors? I mean, there are plenty of artworks and designs out there that use many different hues, but still manage to look great. Well, let's look at some nice pieces of art and see how they do it. Oftentimes, you can observe that there are just one or two, maybe three colors that dominate a picture and appear in most parts of it. And the other colors are just in the details. That way, they don't really compete with the main colors and look harmonious without being overwhelming. So if you just focus on a few colors that dominate a picture, you can usually add more to spice up your details, and the picture will look good. As long as the spots where you have these unrelated extra colors are very, very small, all right, another way to make unrelated colors look good together is to bring them closer together by lowering their saturation. Let me give you an example. Right here, we got many different colors that don't really connect with each other. They are just there looking like a wild kindergarten party and none of the colors really speak because they are all equally loud. But now if I lower the saturation and increase the brightness a little bit, the whole thing actually starts looking like a pleasing texture, and it can be used as a background for a design or a text, and you can even add colorful brush strokes and spots, and they look right because of the contrast. This is a useful technique that you can observe being used in many great paintings. The artist uses many different unrelated colors and connects them simply by bringing them closer together with low saturation. This is a great way to create harmony between unrelated colors, and it's a great way to give your paintings an extra layer of detail and life. Having not just one color in a texture but multiple colors with low saturation is, I would say, a pro trick to elevate your art to the next level in terms of color. But not only saturation can be used to make unrelated colors look good together. Another great way is to create a value contrast between them. If you want to combine two or three unrelated colors, you can make one or two of them very bright and the other very dark or two very dark and one very bright or something like this. When there is a huge value contrast between colors, there is focus and a clear separation. And that way, as you can see, I can make different unrelated colors look quite interesting together. And generally, I just have to say this, a good variety of values is one of the easiest ways to enhance your art and make it more interesting. This is certainly more important than a variety of hues. By using darkness and brightness efficiently, you don't even need any different hues to make an image interesting and direct the viewers attention. This is the basis of color harmony. Create balance and focus rather than having lots of different colors. Choose a few main colors, and you can add more in the details, bring different hues in a texture closer together by lowering their saturation and use different values to create contrast and enhance the whole picture. All right, sounds pretty good. But what if you want to create harmony between strong colors? I mean, not everything can be a desaturated texture or a small detail. Well, you've heard me talk about related and unrelated colors. So let's clear up what that means and explore which colors generally work well together. I think there are probably way more options than you're aware of. 19. Color Schemes: Ladies and gentlemen, it's time that I introduce you to the most useful tactic for picking colors and creating harmony, and that is using a color scheme. A color scheme is a framework that you can utilize to find out which hues would work well together in an artwork or design. So hue scheme would be technically more correct, but it is what it is, and it's called color scheme. Color schemes are well explored and pretty much every artist and designer uses them. If your color selection is based on a color scheme, you can be pretty sure that it looks harmonious. So pay attention. You will need this. Here are the six main color schemes. First of all, we got the good old monochromatic color scheme. Monochromatic means it's basically just one hue with different shades, tints, and tones. Who would have thought if you use only one color, you can't really go wrong. However, what you should notice about monochromatic color schemes is that your values, shapes and subject need to be really good. If you don't have any interesting colors, the viewer will naturally completely focus on the subject, and they will pay lots of attention to the shapes. So they have to be on point if you want your work to be appealing and visible. Also, since the color has to perfectly fit the subject, it has to be carefully selected. In an artwork that has only one color, a lot of the feeling of the artwork is based on the effects of that color. So you have to choose it very carefully and be aware of its psychology. And in marketing, the message of a logo, if it has a monochromatic color scheme is also heavily based on the effects of that singular color, which can have positive but also negative effects depending on the color psychology and how you use it. So monochromatic color schemes are especially useful to create focused and atmospheric scenes or a clear and obvious message in marketing. If you want to achieve similar effects, but feel like using more than one color, then it's probably a good idea to use an analogous color scheme. This one uses two, three, or four different hues that are adjacent on the color wheel and therefore just naturally work well together because they have roughly the same, let's say, vibe and usually a simular color temperature. Analogous colors are easy on the eye because they usually have a simular type of energy, but they still provide you with enough variety to have different visual areas, which creates interest. They usually result in a comfortable and peaceful mood. You can often find analogous colors in nature with different shades of green and blue that look really nice together. This is a very beginner friendly color scheme because it's easy to understand and honestly, hard to do wrong. Just pick a few colors that are next to each other, and it usually works out well. So make use of a simple analogous color scheme, and your artwork or design will surely look pleasing pretty much without any risk at all, because analogous colors always work. Alright, then we got color schemes using complimentary colors. This is pretty much the opposite of monochromatic and analogous color schemes because a pleasing harmony of simular colors is not the only way to make a visual look appealing. Another method is to create a striking contrast, which usually results in even more interest. And that's where complimentary colors come in handy. For a complimentary color scheme, you pick one color, and then you pick the one on the opposite side of the color wheel, yellow and purple, blue and orange, red and green. These are classic complimentary color pairs that you probably know and you can use to create intense and striking visuals. I should note, however, that you can also slightly move left or right when choosing your complimentary color, due to the fact that there are slightly different color wheels. But in order to have a complimentary effect, two chosen colors should be very far away from each other. Just remember this and you're good to go, no matter if you're using the RGB, RYB, or CMY color wheel. Color theory is luckily not that precise, so don't worry. Complimentary colors are very popular because they naturally work well together, and using them is a very efficient way to make an image up here interesting and pleasing. But not through a calm and harmonious look, but because of the tension that complimentary colors have between them. This is what you should be aware of. You don't even need to give your complimentary colors different values to create contrast because they just naturally have it. If you have a visual where two colors bring totally different effects to the table like complimentary colors do, you can play with that very well. Often complimentary colors are used to intensify a polarity between two parties, like good and evil, for example, and light and shadow areas in video games or movies are very often highlighted with the complimentary colors orange and blue. So complementary colors are very useful to separate elements that are supposed to be opposing each other or simply to make something stand out. But they can also be used to give a more uniform element like a pattern, more depth and more interest. Complementary colors are just a natural eye catcher, and therefore, many companies use complimentary colors in their logos. Plus, complimentary colors are the reason why many natural things look nice, like a Christmas tree with red decoration or a sunset over the sea, for example. Here is a pro trick for complimentary colors that many people don't know about. You don't have to only use two colors. You can also choose a few analogous colors and then you add a single complimentary color to them. This results in very rich and pleasing looking compositions, and it gives you more options than just two colors. But here's the important thing, only add analogous colors to one member of the complimentary color pair. Really have just a few analogous colors and then a single complimentary color to create a little bit of contrast and tension. If you add more complementaries, then you have too many colors, and this should be avoided. Notice that complimentary colors generally work better when one color is dominating the other. Like in this image right here where we have a complimentary color pair, but one color is obviously the main part and the other one just a small accent. This works well because you have the interest and tension that complimentary colors give you, but there is not that much competition. If you have a picture where two complimentary colors are equally distributed, they might start biting each other a little bit, which can be good or bad depending on what you want to achieve. So be aware of that. Some might argue that complimentary colors are overused. They are easy to understand and many people know about them. But still, I would say you can make very unique things when using this color scheme, if you explore all the different options with analogous colors or different distributions. Generally, a complimentary color scheme is a great choice if you want to make your art or design stand out. Alright, moving on, we got the triadic color scheme. A triadic color scheme utilizes three colors that are equally far away from each other on the color wheel and create a triangle. So it's a bit like complimentary, but with three colors instead of two. This results in a more rich color selection if you choose to go with a triadic color scheme. Three colors from completely different parts of the color wheel each bring a different energy with them. So you have a lot going on with this color scheme, and it can be tricky to pull off a triadic color scheme because it often makes images look cartoony or too colorful. But if you handle it right, it's definitely awesome. This is why triadic colors are a popular choice for eye catching logos. They have lots of variety while still looking, harmonious and complete. Like complimentary colors, triadic colors work best when one or two colors dominate. So for example, you have one color and two are the accent, or you use two colors a lot, and you use one as the accent. But generally, you should avoid an equal use of all three. And especially don't make all three colors super saturated, except, of course, you want to have something that looks very cartoony and colorful. So the triadic color scheme may be a tool that's a bit more tricky to use, but triadic colors are powerful if they fit the subject and each color serves a purpose. Okay, then we have the split complementary color scheme, one of my personal favorites. This one is made up of one color and then the two colors that are next to its complimentary color. So it's a bit like the complimentary color scheme, but with two colors instead of one. So you have more creative freedom. And the interesting thing is that with this one, you can create tension, but also balance, depending on how you use it, which makes it really versatile. Generally, a split complimentary color scheme with saturated colors makes images look very joyous and lively, like this one right here. Many great artworks make use of this color scheme, which is quite understandable. It's super versatile and useful in art and design. In my opinion, a split complementary color scheme is one of the best ways to stand out amongst your competitors. It's a little bit underrated, and many artists and designers don't even know it exists. What I like to do and what I would recommend is using the one color as the main color and the two opposing ones as axons. This works pretty much always and results in really nice visuals. So you should definitely try this out when using a split complimentary color scheme. Trust me, it's a really nice one, so make use of it. All right. And finally, we got the tetradic or double complimentary color scheme. This one is composed of two pairs of complimentary colors like this, for example. So this one provides you with a huge variety of color choices. And because there are so many options with so many different colors, it can be hard to get the tetradic color scheme right. You should definitely avoid an equal use of all four colors because this will result in a wild and overwhelming composition that you want to avoid at all costs, except you have a super simple subject like a square, and you still want to make it look alive and colorful, like the Microsoft logo. In that case, you can go all in. But generally the tetra color scheme works best when the two complimentary color pairs appear in different parts of the image. You can, for example, separate the foreground and background of an image very nicely and professionally by using different pairs of complementary colors for them. That way, both parts are visible but still distinct, which is pretty cool. Or you can use the complimentary color pairs like this with one appearing in one part and the other one surrounding it. So I would say the tetradic color scheme is definitely an advanced one. You should use it when there is a lot going on in your image that you need to separate somehow. When used right, the tetradic or double complementary color scheme can result in a very interesting color composition, and it can help you keep the viewer in your picture for a long time. All right, these are the main color schemes that you should know and utilize if you want to become a master of color. Look at any artwork or design that you find pleasing in terms of color, and you will most likely find one of these color schemes in one way or another. A natural approach to making an artwork or design is to start with one subject that has a color and then choosing the other colors using a color scheme. For example, if your subject is supposed to stand out, you can just add one complimentary color in the background, and if your subject is supposed to be embedded in a lively environment, you can choose more colors using an analogous triadic or split complementary color scheme. Always think about how many colors would be appropriate. More colors usually result in more energy and they make your visual look more alive. Think about if you want more harmony, in which case, you would choose colors on the same side of the color wheel or tension for which you lean toward color schemes with opposing colors. In a practical sense, you can start by using a color scheme to pick fitting hues for your artwork or design, and then you select these hues and simply vary their values and saturation. That way, you can fill your image with a huge variety of colors while making sure they look harmonious, and this is how you can use color schemes. Okay, once you've understood this, move on to the next lesson where we add another dimension to color schemes by exploring color palettes. Let's go. 20. Color Palettes: Moving on, the next step after deciding on a color scheme is creating a color palette. Now, you might ask yourself, but what's the difference? Not even a bad question. A color palette is like a color scheme, a collection of colors that you put together in order to model which ones you want to use in your artwork or design. But while a color scheme only refers to the hues and how they connect, a color palette is a direct color collection. So that also includes value and saturation to model the final colors of your work. So this is not only for the hues, but for the actual colors that you're going to use, which is very useful because obviously not only hues play a role in art and design, but also values and the saturation of your colors. So it makes sense to model your colors and see if they work together before starting the creation process. And that's what color palettes are made for. Color palettes are very flexible. You can make fancy boxes in a design software or simply just scribble some dots next to each other. You literally just want to check what your colors look like next to each other to imagine what it will look like in the final picture or design. So you can do pretty much whatever you like here. Depending on where you look, a color palette typically has 4-7 colors. But this can vary. If you plan to create a big painting with many different colors, then you can make a color palette with eight or more colors to see how they work together. Or if you make something very simple like a logo, then you can also experiment with two or three colors and just fine tune their relationship. Color palettes are also flexible in terms of detail. You can make a color palette for an artwork and just model the two main hues with two values for each of them. Or you can model five different values and saturation levels for each of the hues and end up with a color palette that has ten colors, which is, I would say, an unusually precise plan for an artwork. But some people like to work like that. Officially, there are no rules for how detailed you should get with your color palette but here is what I would do. Think about what the most extreme colors of your artwork are going to be and model them with a color palette. The extreme colors. That's the important part. So maybe one or two of the brightest colors, one or two of the darkest, the most saturated color, and at least one of every type of hue that you're going to use. You don't have to model every value and every saturation level of your artwork. This just doesn't make sense because there are usually way too many of them. But as you've hopefully learned from the color schemes lesson, there are usually just two or three maybe four different hues that you have in an artwork. And when you make a color palette, you should include at least one variation of each of the hues you're going to use. So just model the extremes and the hues. All right. Now, here are some example color palettes with five colors that I just made. I'm going to go over them and explain them to you. So you know the thought process behind them. Typically, a color palette has a main color and at least one variation of it. So in this case, it's blue, and as you can see, I got some very dark blue in here as well. Usually, I like to start with the main color and its variations on the left side, but it's up to you. As you can see, I got some variations of brown here to see if that value range of brown connects with the main color blue, which it does in this case, I think. And the purpose of a color palette can be as simple as that. Just, Yo, I'm going to use brown here, so let me see if different versions of brown work together with this blue. And yeah, that way, you can see where it's going. And now you can see why we've covered color scheme so intensely because maybe you've already noticed every color palette here is based on a different color scheme. If you like, you can pause the video now and try to find out which color scheme applies to which color palette. Would be pretty good practice, actually. But yeah, it's up to you. Let me explain what's going on here. First, this is a bit tricky to spot, but we got a double complimentary color scheme, very desaturated and pastel, because four saturated colors are sometimes tricky to combine and very intense. But like this, as you can see, it works out great. Could be used to make some edgy, modern website or something. At least that's what they all seem to look like. Then we have a classic complimentary color scheme, very deep and saturated blue, but very desaturated orange, which makes it appear brown. That way, the two main hues don't have super high tension between them, but they still provide enough variety to have different visual areas. So this could be used to paint like a ship on the sea or something. All right, then we got a split complimentary color scheme in this palette right here, green and purple shades with some very bright yellow as an accent. This could be used to paint like a garden with flowers or generally a scene in nature that looks very harmonious and colorful. Then we got an analogous color scheme with a nice transition from yellow to pink, but also from light to dark. This color usage would result in a scene with a very clear mood, like a sunset with reflections in the clouds that results in all these colors being used, simple and harmonious. And this one obviously a monochromatic color scheme, one hue and yeah, this one could be used for anything that has this one color. Honestly, you don't really have to create a color palette if you want to make something with a monochromatic color scheme, but I just wanted to include it here. Finally, of course, the last one missing, we got a very intense triadic color scheme, including the primary colors yellow, red and blue, but also black and white. You just can't see the white right now unless I lower the brightness of the background. And yeah, this one would probably be fitting for a striking company logo. And what I just did is something that I highly recommend you do when you make a color palette for a design. Check if your colors work well on both dark and bright backgrounds. As you can see, there would be visibility issues with some of these colors if you use that color palette for a logo and you put that logo on a different background. This is also the case if you make something for a website. There could be a dark mode, so you need to think about that and check if your colors work for that as well. But yeah, these are some examples for what your color palettes could look like in very different situations. They all vary in their color scheme, their range of hues and values, their saturation, but also their usability for art or design. There are so many options for color palettes that I'm pretty sure you already have some ideas, but hold on to them for a minute. The amount of each color that you use is very important, too, not just this color in this color and this color, but you should also define what's the main color and what are the axons. For example, split complementary color schemes often work best when the color on one side is the main color, and the two on the opposite side are the axons. What I would do is start with the main color on the left side, maybe add one or two variations, and then the other colors. That way, you have an overview of your color structure before committing to your work. So before you start making a digital design or artwork, create a color palette that gives an overview for your intended range of values, saturation, and hues, ideally based on a fitting color scheme. Instead of messing around with a color selector, just select the colors from your color palette and only adjust value and saturation according to your needs. I like putting a color palette on a separate layer when I'm working on a digital artwork, for example. I just turn it on and off whenever I need to select a specific color from it, which is very practical. And this works in every drawing and design software that has layers, which should be pretty much any of them. That way, you have a great orientation for which types of colors you want to use. You can just slightly vary the values and the saturations a little bit and keep the hues the same as they are on the color palette. And then you don't have to think about color so much and you can completely focus on creating good shapes and a good composition. By the way, when you make a traditional artwork, it often helps to create a digital color palette first and really fine tuning your colors like that because you don't want to experiment so much with real life colors because that can get very messy and also wasteful. Just make a digital color palette, optimize it, and then mix your real life colors so they look like the colors from that palette. So yeah, there are many, many ways to use color palettes. Before you start making an artwork or design, make a color palette to imagine what it will look and feel like in terms of color. Include your most important and your most extreme colors and then fine tune them and make sure there is harmony before you start creating. That way, color palettes are a reliable insurance for your colors in art and design. So why not use them? 21. The 60-30-10 Rule: Now, it's not only important which colors you use in your artworks or designs, but also how much of which color. I've told you that you can use a color palette to make distinctions between, for example, the main color and the accent colors. But are there actually any rules for color distribution as there are for color selection? In general, not really. You see, there are artworks with two colors that work equally together, artworks with one dominant color and one small accent, artworks with four main colors and pretty much anything you can imagine. So in art, it mainly depends on context, which is nice because you have lots of freedom when it comes to color distribution, if you just use contrast and composition well. But in design, there is actually one reoccurring theme that I want to show you. It's not really a rule, but more like a practical orientation for how much of which color you should use to make something look pleasing. And that is the 603010 rule. The 603010 rule states that 60% of a visual should be the main color, 30% another color, and 10% an accent color. You can mainly observe this distribution being used in interior design, web, and UI design. I would say, let's have a look at some examples. Right here, we got a super classic example for a room that uses the 603010 rule. 60% is white, as interior designers like to do it. Then 30% is brown in the chairs, table, and stairs, but also the carpet. And then 10% is this green accent with these small plants that give the whole thing some life. Another one. Here we got 60% blue in the wall, 30% brown in the furniture, and as the 10%, we got these white accents all over the room. Now, as you can see, there are also other colors in these objects in the room, like red or yellow and some green plants. But the point is that all the main elements, the things that make up, let's say, 90% of the room follow this 60, 3010 distribution. And here's an example for this being used on a website. We got white as 60%, blue as 30%, and nothing else. So it looks nice and harmonious, except a few yellow call to action buttons that they want the viewer to click on. And if you look closely, you can also observe a little bit of that yellow on these penguins. On websites, this is a very common color structure. You have for 60%, something very, very neutral, like white or black or gray or something very desaturated. Then you have one color to contrast that to give it a bit more interest, that is a bit more defined, usually. And then for the 10%, that's the small accent which is usually used for stuff like call to action buttons or things that are supposed to draw attention, they have a very saturated and signaling color. So it clearly stands out. So that's usually something like red, orange, yellow, pink, purple, or light green or something like that. And yeah, that's very common for websites. However, websites that contain many or big images usually cut back on the default colors because that would be a bit too overwhelming. So when you have a website with many or big images, maybe just use one neutral background color like white or black or gray, and then one color for the call to action buttons that clearly stands out like blue in this case. May have noticed the 603010 rule usually doesn't refer to only single colors, but more like types of colors. The main color may not only be plain white, but white and light gray or white and beige, like in this case, the secondary color for 30% may not only be blue but blue and a bluish green, for example. The only important thing is that the colors in each segment should be quite close to each other. If you look at their hue, their value, and saturation, at least two of these aspects should be almost identical for the 603010 rule to work. Take this room right here, for example. The main color, the 60% is white, which allows for some variation in the other segments. So as the 30%, they put brown and blue. These colors look very different at first glance, but they have almost identical value and saturation, which is why they work together as one segment. There is a bit darker, more saturated counter to the white. And as the 10%, we obviously got these yellow chairs and pillows, which clearly stand out and therefore just make up a very small part of the room. So this room is a great example for a more sophisticated use of the 603010 rule. The rule is mostly used with very neutral colors occupying one segment like white or gray or beige and pretty much any other two colors work with that. If you choose, however, to have three saturated colors, it makes sense to use, can you guess it? Of course, a color scheme to make sure they work well together. Obviously, as you have three segments, a triadic color scheme or a split complementary color scheme would be a fitting choice. But depending on how many hues you have in which segment, this can vary. Just remember what I told you in color harmony. You should probably not make all three colors supersaturated in most cases. As you can see, this 603010 rule is quite flexible, which you can use to your advantage. Here is how you can use it to level up your color palettes for our design. What I like to do when using the 60, 3010 rule is making a color palette with six colors. So two variations for each segment. And, of course, as this is about distribution, I also model the amount of each color that I'm going to use 60, 30, ten. And then I can see if it looks good, and I can use it for a design, potentially. Here is another idea for modeling color distribution. You can make different layers in a design software, each resembling one color with its approximate size, and then move these layers around, multiply them, and see how the colors could work together and whether or not they fit with the 60, 3010 distribution. That way, you can make a very abstract model of something where you simply check out the colors. Such a color sketch, as I like to call it, is not only useful when you make something with the 603010 rule. But generally, if you plan an artwork and you want to model how your colors could look like inner composition. This is like one level after color palettes. This is not super common because usually it's enough to just make a color palette and imagine the distribution of your colors. But if you make an artwork or a design that requires lots of work, then you can use such a color sketch to make sure that everything is absolutely right with the colors. And this is also useful if you have problems imagining what the colors from a color palette would look like in an artwork. With a color sketch, it's a bit more clear what's going on. So yeah, a color sketch may not be super common, but it's just another tool that I wanted to show you. If you use the 603010 rule, make a color palette where you include the distribution of your colors. Again, for color palettes, it doesn't really matter if you make clean boxes or you just scribble around to approximately resemble the 603010 distribution. The rule is a clever solution if two colors would be too boring, but you don't want to seem too colorful and overwhelming with your design. One main color, one medium contrast, and one small accent at roughly 60, 3010. Follow this rule in interior design, web, and UI design, and you can be pretty sure that your colors look pleasing and professional. 22. Applying Color Theory: Now let's talk about how to actually use the stuff you've learned so far because I'll admit that was quite a lot of theory, and putting all of that into practice and thinking about all these things can be a bit tricky in the beginning. The thing is, there are many different ways to apply color theory to your work. Every good artist and designer uses the principles that we've talked about. That's why we've done it. But everybody's process is a bit different, and you may be confused where to start. So how can you practically implement color theory into your work? Well, it heavily depends on what you're making. So let me give you a few examples for different situations in art and design. First of all, I should mention that if you draw or paint something purely from reference, you don't need color theory at all. You see the thing, you recreate the thing. Simple as that. Color theory is only useful if you need to make decisions related to color when you create something new, which you don't have to do if you just replicate a scene. But you can also paint something from reference but with different colors. That's also an option. Or you modify a scene to fit a certain color scheme. This is a popular approach for painting. In that case, you can apply color theory to make your image more pleasing and to achieve certain effects. You can, for example, make a green bush more saturated and shift the hue from blue to even more green in order to increase the contrast with the red flowers and make the image more tense. So you can draw or paint objects from reference and recreate the shapes, but you can additionally use color theory to improve them and achieve certain effects. Plus, you can modify or leave out elements of a certain color if they are disturbing a potential color scheme. This is a super useful approach because by doing that, you can use pretty random scenes as reference and make them look super cool and artistic. Or you can compose a scene made up of different elements that you draw from different references. In that case, you also have to make color decisions, and you can apply the knowledge from this course. But this is pretty hard because you often have to adjust the lighting of the elements to fit that scene. So putting together elements from different references is not super popular, but if you do it, you have to make color decisions. So let's talk about how to make good color decisions by using color theory. Imagine you want to create an artwork. Oftentimes, you already know your subject. You know, you want to paint somebody doing something and maybe some trees in the background. In that case, you already know a few things. You will need green for the trees, blue for the sky, and a little bit of gray and brown for the tree trunks and the ground. So there are a few colors that are pretty much fixed, and you need to make them work. But there may be other things that you have not yet decided on like the clothing of the character, for example, and these things are where you need to make good decisions. So the clothing of the character in this case, will probably be a focus point. So it makes sense to stop at this point, look at the color wheel and ask yourself, what would be the best choice? Do you want the character to stand out? Maybe chose a color that is complimentary to green and blue, or do you want the character to harmoniously fit into the environment? Then chooser color analogous to green and blue. And the amazing thing is that these compositional choices often work very well together with color psychology. If you give the character blue clothing, they will fit in, look sophisticated and harmonious, not only because blue is an analogous color to the environment, but also because that's what blue does. Give them red clothing, and they're going to stand out, be an energetic focus point against the calming background scene, and possibly even look like an intruder. Not only because red is a totally different color, a complimentary color to the environment, but also because that's just what red does. It's an aggressive, energetic color. And this works for all angles on the color wheel, colors that are far away from each other often have opposing psychological effects. So by applying that purposefully to your subjects, you can use that to your advantage and give your compositions a whole different level of meaning, and you can improve them both in terms of color harmony and color psychology. And how do you experiment with this and find out what would be fitting before committing to your work? Of course, by making a color palette and testing your colors like that. This shows how color psychology and color schemes can beautifully support each other. In art, you have many options to implement color theory, but you're always safe if you think about it first, immediately after deciding on a subject. As soon as you have one subject with a fixed color, start a color palette and then use both color schemes and color psychology to complete it. You want to paint a fox, it's going to be orange. Do you want it to harmoniously fit into the environment? Then make it stand in an autumn forest or lie in the sand or sit on some desert rocks? Wanted to stand out and be an energetic focus point with its orange color, then let the fox walk through a snowy field, a dark cavern with green, bluish light or sail on a boat in the ocean or something. I know it's a very simple and kind of stupid illustration, but I think it shows very well how you can make these color decisions because this is basically how it works. And I honestly really enjoy using color theory to fine tune my subjects and deciding what I want to depict. On the other hand, if you make an abstract art work, oftentimes your colors are the main subject and not just something to support it. So here it's a bit different. What I like to do for abstract art is choosing colors first and then coming up with ideas for how these colors could interact with each other. Sometimes there are hard edges and lots of contrast. Sometimes the colors smoothly flow into each other and so on. In abstract art, this is very much based on feeling, and you can choose pretty crazy colors and still manage to make them work together. That's the cool thing about abstract art. Intuition and flow are key here. In abstract art, you generally have lots of freedom. But color theory is always there to help you out. Whether you need to make an artwork look more harmonious, or you need ideas in the first place. It just always pays off being familiar with color theory. Of course, there is way more to abstract art than just that, which is why I've made separate courses on it where I dive a bit deeper because I think it's very interesting. But I'm going to be honest, having a good understanding of color alone is in many cases already enough to make artworks that look awesome. I'm not even kidding. Choose a few colors using a color scheme and randomly combine them on the canvas, and it pretty much always looks like a pleasing abstract artwork. That's the power of color theory. Now let's move on to design because here it's a bit different. If you design a website or a logo for a company, you often have given outcomes that you need to achieve with it. Brand identity is very important and should be communicated with the colors of a logo and website. You know that by now. Strong and striking or easy going and playful, full of action or calm and relaxing. Speaking to a young audience or an older one, looking expensive or cheap, smooth and pastel or bold and clear, flashy and outstanding or natural and authentic. In design, you basically collect keywords for what you're trying to achieve, and you make color decisions based on these keywords. Again, not only in terms of color psychology, like red for action, blue for trust, green for growth, and so on, but also in terms of color schemes like we've talked about, complementary colors for a striking effect, triadic color schemes for a rich and complete look, analogous colors for a harmonious look, and so on. Color is directly connected to brand identity. So whenever you find yourself in a situation where you have to decide something for a company, ask for as many keywords as possible. And if you are responsible, ask yourself and collect keywords. Who is the target audience? Which colors do they prefer? How should the brand be perceived? Collect your keybords, then you can use color schemes and color psychology to create a fitting color palette, and then you can use it to create the design. And if your design is supposed to look pleasing, maybe consider using the 60, 3010 rule in addition to that, which you can also model in your color palette, as I've shown you. So these were some examples for how you can apply color theory to your work. But keep in mind that these are just useful ideas and common practices, not necessarily what you have to do in order to succeed. You can also use keybords to select colors for an artwork, or you can make very artistic websites, for example. There are endless possibilities, and color theory is a tool that's not only powerful but also flexible. You can always return to this course to rewatch the important lessons about certain colors or color schemes. It's all there, so practice what you've learned and you will find your way to apply color theory to your work. 23. Color & Light: Now we have to talk about color and light, at least for a moment. This is one of the most complex subtopics of color theory, so I won't go too much into detail here. Light in general, is something that definitely deserves its own course. So this is still just about color. But there are some interesting things that happen with color and light that I don't want to leave out in this course. First of all, if you look at the color wheel with all these different hues in their purest form, you may think that hue is the only thing that separates them. Same saturation, same value, just blue, green, red, yellow, et cetera. Let's add a few of these romas here. Just a few bras strokes with hues in their purest form. Now I'm going to set the image mode to grayscale in Creta, so all the saturation is removed. And look at this. These basic hues actually have very different values, and you can even see that on the color selector now. As I slide around here, the value of the color changes, even though I'm technically only changing the hue. This becomes very clear if we take pure blue and pure yellow from the bottom right corner of the color selector and put them over each other like that. Let's set the image mode to grayscale. And yeah, this is a clear difference, almost black and white. So different hues have different values. Now, what do you do with this knowledge? Well, it's not that useful. Just something to keep in mind when making an artwork. Sometimes you can just add a different hue instead of tint or shade to create a value contrast, which can result in your images looking very alive. And if you want to make an image with a dark feeling, make use of dark hues, not only dark values to intensify that. That way, you can give your images that little bit of extra spice. So remember this, it might come in handy at some point. Next, this is a bit more intuitive, but colors get brighter and fade to light blue the further they are away from you. You can see this very clearly in landscapes like this picture right here. We got this big dark rock that looks kind of neutral and even a little bit orange. But these other rocks that should be of the same material get brighter and brighter and more light blue the further they are away. And this happens to any object, as you can observe in real life or any pictures of landscapes. To determine how much your colors are affected, I recommend looking at references or going by your feeling. There is no exact formula for this. Like every 100 meters, your hues shift by eight degrees of the color wheel and your values shift by. Unfortunately, no, you just have to look at references, and you can eventually develop an intuition for this if you paint without reference. So yeah, keep this in mind. Okay, now comes the really weird stuff. When light hits an object and produces shadows and highlights, it doesn't only change values. You know, darker weather is shadow, brighter weather is light, but there are also interesting things that happen with hues when they are affected by light or shadow. Let's have a look at a seemingly simple example. This ball right here is struck by light from the left side and therefore casts a shadow to the right. So it's bright on the left side and darker on the right side. Makes sense. But if we look closely, there is actually a lot more going on than just that because even though the original light source is clearly up on the left, there are reflections from both the ground and the white box behind the ball. The ball is a bit blue on the bottom because of reflections from the ground. And on the right side, where the ball should be dark, it's actually a bit brighter than in the middle because of reflections from the box. As you can see, even in very simple objects, colors can get crazy and unpredictable depending on all kinds of factors. For example, the angles of the light, different materials, reflections from all kinds of directions, or even multiple light sources, which also happens, and then it gets really wild. This makes it quite challenging to draw or paint realistic objects that are struck by light. And the only thing you can really do is use a reference and observe it carefully. Don't just look at an object and be like, All right, this is a ball. It has light on the left, so it's a bit darker on the right. You can do that if you make a ball that is far away and not very detailed. Nobody will care about different colors or reflective lights if your object is not the focus point and just very small. But if you want to make something that really has this realistic feeling in terms of light, use a reference to determine how your colors are affected because this is a complex topic, and unless you're already a master painter, you will have no idea how to correctly use light and color. Look closely, and you will very often find that there is actually a lot more going on than just highlight area and shadow area. You need to include this in your painting if it's supposed to look realistic. That's all I can give you here. Alright. Here's another example for how light can affect colors. In this image, we have a few trees and a gray street. Now, look at the color selector as I select colors from the image. If I pick the colors from the street, you can see that it's not actually gray, but a little bit yellow and orange. If I pick the colors from the shadows, though, you can see that they're actually on the total opposite side of the color wheel. The shadows are not only darker, but they have colder hues as well, like blue. And if I pick the colors from this tree, you can see there is light orange in the highlights and dark blue in the shadows. Light and shadow do not only change the values of objects, but also their hues. And this is not just from reflections, but by default. Shadows move hues toward green and blue, and light moves them toward yellow and orange. You can observe this everywhere from good character sketches to real life. So if you paint something that has highlight and shadow areas, shift the hues in the highlight areas a little bit toward yellow, and in the shadow areas a little bit toward blue. It doesn't have to be super saturated or completely yellow, completely blue, but just a slight shift in the hues can often be that one factor that makes your images look more realistic. For example, let's look at this tree painting that I made in another one of my courses. When painting trees, we need, of course, lots of green for the foliage and brown for the tree trunk. But look at the color selector as I select the hues now. The green is closer to yellow in the highlight areas and closer to blue in the shadow areas. And on the tree trunk, it's the same thing, starting with a different hue. We have brown, which is desaturated orange, but in the highlights, it's a bit more on the yellow side, and in the shadows, it's a bit more on the red side, which is closer to blue. Plus, we even got a little bit of blue reflective lights here. So that's a reference to the previous point. By the way, making impressionist art basically just means heavily exaggerating these effects, like this very old birch painting that I made where the shadows on the tree stems are straight blue, but they don't even look out of place. Or this classic painting by Claude Mony, where the shadows are completely saturated with blue, and the highlights are saturated with orange and yellow. But it doesn't even look that unrealistic, just a little bit over exaggerated. This tells us that we intuitively know how light affects colors and that it changes the hues. But if we create art ourselves, it's very easy to forget that. We have to actively become aware of how light changes colors, and that's basically what this lesson is for. At the end of the day, my best tip for you is use a reference if you want realistic light and colors because it can get complicated very quickly. You can slightly exaggerate light and color to increase the psychological effects like I've shown you. But then you have to be even more careful to get them right. So use a reference, study it carefully, and you're going to go when it comes to light and color. 24. Color Transitions & Gradients: All right, here is a little extra lesson about color transitions and gradients because it's not only possible to have single colors interact with each other. Sometimes they flow and create a transition. Especially the designers amongst you will know this because that's a very common effect. For many people, even experienced artists and designers, this poses a huge challenge when creating color schemes and color palettes because they don't know how gradients and color transitions fundamentally work. And that's why many people just choose to leave them out, which is a pity because color transitions are an incredibly useful tool to elevate your designs and artworks to the next level. So let me clear up a few things here and let me give you a few tips. This is going to be interesting. First of all, it should be noted that color transitions and gradients reduce the contrast between two colors. That's because you have all the middle versions in the transition area. For example, when you have a transition from black to white, you have all sorts of gray between them. A transition like this removes the hard edge, the immediate difference between two colors, which is responsible for the contrast. This can be used to give your images a little bit more detail without making them too hard on the eye. And this works easily for value and saturation transitions. Nothing to worry about here. For hues, however, there are a few important things. Hue transitions are a great way to introduce more detail to a sunset, for example, to just make an image feel more interesting and moral life without having too much contrast or tension or to do stuff like adding detail to snow with blue and white flowing into each other or a few different types of sand in a desert. There are many options to make fancy transitions between simular colors to give them a bit more depth and detail. However, what if you want to make a color transition between complimentary colors? Complementary colors have lots of contrast and tension between them. So would a transition between them make them more neutral and possibly even calming? Is this a good idea? Well, let's have a look. I'm going to fill this canvas with bright orange first, and then let's add a blue gradient on top of it. Blue is the complimentary color of orange. I'm going to pull it over here and then boom, here is our color transition from blue to orange. Be honest. Does this look nice? Well, the software does its best to make the colors flow smoothly, so it does have some appeal because it's a bit like a pattern and the human eye just likes patterns. But in terms of color harmony, well, it doesn't work at all. We have this weird gray, muddy looking area in the middle that wouldn't be a very smart addition to most designs. And this happens with the other complimentary pairs, too. If I fill the image with green and add a red gradient, if I fill the image with purple and add a yellow gradient and so on, the transition area is just always well, ugly. And there is an interesting reason for why that happens. Look at the color selector as I select the colors from this transition from blue to orange. I'm clicking many times here, so you can see, many samples. And have you noticed something? The hue slowly shifts all the way over the color wheel from one color to the other Because this is how a transition works. You need all the colors between two colors, and maybe now you can already see why a color transition between two complementary colors doesn't work. You need too many different hues, which contradicts basic color harmony. And this happens for any of the complimentary colors. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. We have all these different hues that destroy any chance for color harmony. Now, the interesting thing is that the software actually makes use of one of the tricks that I've shown you in order to avoid a rainbow pattern. Look at the saturation of the colors as I select them from the transition once again. We start with a very saturated blue. It becomes less and less saturated. And then when we get to orange, it becomes saturated again. This is why this transition doesn't look like a rainbow because all the hues in the middle are less saturated, as I've told you in color harmony. You can bring different hues closer together and make them look harmonious by lowering their saturation, but it still looks awful because you still need saturation for the colors on the edge, and you just need too many different hues to connect the complimentary colors. You have to move all the way over the color wheel. So don't make transitions between colors that are far away from each other on the color wheel, except you have a very specific reason to do so. I honestly can't think of an example right now. Maybe you can. Remember that in order to create a transition between two colors, you need all the colors between them. In traditional art, this should usually not be a problem. If you mix two colors that are far away from each other, they immediately become ugly and you'll notice that you probably shouldn't be using that. But in design and digital art, don't let the software fool you because it's desaturated. It will still probably look bad because there are too many hues. So if you want or need a color transition somewhere, make it more subtle. Use analogous colors. This is the way to do it. Or alternatively, you can also desaturate the whole thing immensely to make the different colors not bite each other, as I've told you in color harmony. That's pretty much the only way to make a transition between complementary colors work. But if you want actual saturated colors, they have to be analogous. A color transition between blue and light blue or green and blue or red and orange looks very nice. Just notice that the further the hues are away from each other, the more hues you need between them, and this can influence your ability to use color schemes or saturation. One color transition alone already includes a few different hues, so it acts like a small analogous color scheme, and you have to calculate that in in order to not make a visual that's too chaotic. This is what most people get wrong about color transitions. As soon as they introduce one, they have too many colors, and the image looks awful. Now, here's how I would use color transitions and gradients, and this is a general pro tip for art. If you choose a color scheme, I recommend you always use the classic RYB color wheel with 12 colors. By the way, you can download this in the course description. I think I forgot to mention that. Then when you make a color palette for which you also need to include value and saturation, you have to make use of a color selector, or you mix in more colors traditionally. But notice, if you make an artwork, you can always slightly shift left or right for every hue and it will still work. If you use a blue hue, feel free to add a few slightly different variations to it. You can make them flow into each other, create a color transition or make a hard edge or whatever you like. As long as you have a very small range between two hues, they will still count as one segment of a color scheme, and you can choose the other colors relatively freely. Generally, the bigger a transition, the less other colors you can use because it acts like an analogous color scheme. You can observe this in many great paintings, actually. There is not one single exact hue for one segment of a color scheme, but a few different ones that are just very similar. And sometimes there is a small transition or gradient between them. This often makes artworks or designs far more exciting. If you expand the transition, however, you need to calculate that into your color palette. If you have a transition from yellow to orange and blue as a complimentary color, it will work in most cases. But if you have a transition from yellow to orange and then one from blue to green as well, then it's probably too much simply because there are too many hues. This is how you can use color transitions. Keep them subtle and analogous and be conscious of basic color harmony. Then gradients and transitions can be an easy addition of depth and detail that elevates your arch or design to the next level. 25. Common Color Errors: So by now we've covered everything that's really important. Before I can let you go, I want to warn you of some of the most common and detrimental errors in color usage. This is the part that I've been waiting for the whole time because now I can rent. I've made a bunch of color mistakes in the past, and you will also make them if you don't know what they are. Let's talk about these errors so you can minimize the probability of them happening. Let's go. First of all, I'm just going to say this again, but using too much color and too much saturation. Yes, you've heard it in this course before a few times, but it's still the most common error that beginner artists and designers make when they try to use color theory. So you must internalize this. Tune it down unless you really know what you're doing. If you've got a color palette, look at it and ask yourself which of these colors really have to be saturated. Just because you know of all these nice psychological effects of blue and green and orange and white doesn't mean that you have to use all of them at once, because they will likely cancel each other out and become hard on the eye unless you're like a master of abstract art. Always ask yourself which colors really have to be saturated and which ones could be tuned down a little bit or left out completely. Using a basis with desaturated hues and a few different values and then just one chroma as a contrast works pretty much always. If you use two or three or more saturated hues, they really have to fit together, and all of them must have a reason for being there. Otherwise, they become annoying to your viewers. So use color moderately and appropriately. If you really want something to stand out, saturation and hues are nice, but not necessary. Oftentimes, it's just best to go for value or a different type of contrast altogether, like shape or direction or texture. But yeah, contrast is a huge and underrated topic that I'm going to make a separate course about, which brings us to the next aspect, which is not using enough contrast. If you want to achieve anything with a visual, like a painting or a design, there has to be some sort of contrast that guides the viewer's eye. Value is probably the most common and most versatile form of contrast. So I generally recommend using lots of value contrasts in your work. When everything is bright, you look at that one thing that is dark. That's just how it is. But of course, also other types of contrast can be used like saturation or hue or different types of compositional or conceptual contrast. Just always use some sort of contrast whenever you make something visual. Homogeneous and flat pictures are just not interesting to look at. And websites where you can't even tell apart the different elements won't hold viewers for more than 2 seconds, especially nowadays. There is a reason why we pretty much always use black or dark blue to write something on white paper or white text on black or dark gray, like right here. Treat your artworks and designs the same way. If you want something to be visible, it has to be different to its surroundings, which is contrast. As I've said, there are many different types of contrast, and it's definitely worth it diving deeper on this topic. But regarding color, just make sure there is enough contrast in terms of value, hue or saturation, and the viewers can see everything clearly. All right. Another common error that people like to make is not deciding which colors to use beforehand. I mean, you should have learned in this course that you first want to make a color palette to test your colors before committing to your work. But in art, this is really important. So I want to mention it again. It's very hard to change the colors of individual objects in a complex painting without making ugly mistakes. And I speak from experience here. I mean, yes, in digital art, after you're done, you can shift around the hues and the saturation just to see how your image feels with different colors and with a different vibe. And in abstract art, this definitely works very well because you don't have anything realistic that looks horrible with different colors. Like, for example, nature paintings that immediately become dysfunctional as soon as you shift the hues. Selecting individual objects can work, but it's not super precise, and it's very easy to make mistakes. Also, it's just dead annoying. Trust me, I've been there quite a few times in the past, being not satisfied with the color of an object, and, yeah, you don't really want to be in this situation. It's always the best if you just know what the final colors of your work will be during the process. That's why we make color palettes. You can work with a clear vision and apply it to the whole picture. So the subject, the shapes, the colors, and the composition all work together and speak the same language. So plan your colors and think about what you want from them before starting to make an artwork or a design. That will give you the best results. Okay, this next color error is once again, mostly for art. And that is being too conservative with colors. Yes, making realistic paintings and having colors that look like they come straight from nature is generally a good thing, but it can get boring. If you look at pictures that have super awesome colors that seem so deep, you'll often find that they're actually not that realistic. Colors are powerful, and that's why many artists choose to exaggerate them, especially in expressionism and impressionism. These art movements have gifted us some of the most memorable artworks of all time. But color exaggeration is also popular in modern illustration. So you should definitely experiment with colors that are not necessarily super natural, but that would look nice and have an interesting effect. For example, by making some parts more or less saturated or slightly shifting the hues. If this results in more contrast or you can approach a color scheme, this is often worth it. For example, let's say you have a blue background and a human that's not necessarily supposed to be super realistic. You can shift the hue of the skin a bit more toward orange and make it more saturated. That way, you have a bit more intensity and more contrast because you approach the complementary color scheme of blue and orange. This is how many great illustrators work actually, just a few tiny adjustments to improve the color harmony. Of course, this doesn't mean that you should oversaturate everything and put too many colors everywhere, which would be the second mistake that we've talked about. But this is just an idea that I want to share with you. If your illustrations sometimes look a bit boring, maybe just experiment with the colors more, even if they're not that realistic. Use this to break free from boring visuals. Don't be afraid of using crazy colors once in a while. I'm telling you, as long as your color harmony is right, it's going to work out. Next up, color trends. Oh, God. In my humble opinion, color trends are precisely 100% useless. They're nothing but a tool for lazy people who don't know how to handle color themselves and want to outsource their color decisions. And if you paid attention to the lessons of this course, you're not one of them anymore. You don't have to be up to date with color. You only have to understand how it works and what you want to achieve with it. Color psychology exceeds any color trends, and it absolutely trashes them when it's one on one. Do what you have to do and use your whole color knowledge to achieve results with it. Why would you restrict yourself by only using colors that are currently in? There are artworks out there that look cool and their colors achieve effects, even though they're like 1,000-years-old or a few thousand years like this Egyptian thing right here, probably. Do you think Michelangelo asked around which colors people prefer this season? This course shows you precisely how to use color, and the principles that I've taught you are timeless, unlike any color trend that you might come across. You have enough competence to not give a damn. So if you have any goals with your artworks or designs, other than blending in, don't waste your time researching trendy colors. Even when you make a seasonal artwork or design, like adjusting the colors of your website when it's winter. Don't just use the colors that some magazine praises as the January color combo of 2025 or something. Use colors that you associate with winter and that you like. It's really that simple. You now know how to use any color at your will only based on intention and practicality, which you can use to make your colors look good, always, not just the spring. So apply what you've learned in this course, and you don't have to be up to date with color trends at all. Thank you. Okay. Last but definitely not least, make your own color palettes. For real, you've seen how it's done. No need to outsource this part of the creative process to some website. I mean, sure, there are some nice tools out there like Adobe color. You click on try it, you move it around. It's gonna make a color palette or on coolers, where you literally just press the space bar and it generates a random color palette for you. Let me tell you something. You don't need this. Even if some of them look nice, there are major disadvantages that come from using a generated color palette. First of all, half of them don't even look good or even terrible. This proves that there is more to finding colors for your work than just doing it technically correct by using some formula like these websites do. Your colors have to be specifically selected with purpose, and that's clearly missing from these generated palettes. You can use color schemes to find out which colors you want to add to your palette, but this doesn't guarantee a good look. These websites just generate palettes that follow some formula and are only supposed to look not wrong, which they often don't even succeed at. But even if one of these palettes looks nice to you, you haven't made it, so you cannot rely on its usability for your art or design. If you pick your colors step by step and with purpose, they will look way better and be more fitting than any color palette from the Internet. I can promise you that. Plus, it might even save you time. Having an idea for a main color, choosing a few accents, and adding some variations to them is most of the time a quick and intuitive process once you know the basic rules, of course. Plus, it's fun. Do you really want to sit there clicking again and again, waiting for the website to gift you the perfect color palette like a gambling addict on a slot machine? I mean, you are here and you've taken this course. So why not use your skills and your knowledge? You can look at websites like Color Hunt, where the palettes are at least uploaded by users and not automatically generated. But I would use that as inspiration at most. It feels so satisfying to come up with an awesome, unique color palette making an artwork with it, and then seeing how it actually works. So don't skip this part of the creative process. You will have a better workflow and a better result. I guarantee that. All right, this is it. Using too much color and saturation, not using enough contrast, not deciding on colors beforehand, being too conservative of colors, using color trends, and not making your own color palettes. These are absolutely detrimental color mistakes that happen in all fields of art and design. And now that I've told you, you have no excuse to repeat them. So avoid these color errors at all cost if you want to become a master at using color. 26. Class Project: Okay, here we are. You now know basically everything about color that you need to know as an artist or designer. You know what to do, and you know what not to do. Nice. But we all know that knowledge alone isn't enough. So let's actually practice some of the stuff that you've learned here in a very simple way. Because this is a very general course that applies to any field of art and design, it wouldn't really make sense to give you a super specific task like paint a landscape with nice colors. The designers amongst you would be pretty annoyed. And, vice versa, if I told you to make a logo, the artists would probably not be motivated, either, which is understandable. But something that everybody can profit from is making a few color palettes. That's not too much to ask, is it? I mean, I've praised color palettes as a tool so many times here that it would be kind of a waste if I didn't give you the opportunity to practice making them. So I've added this image as a downloadable file with presets for three color palettes. So download it right now and open it up in your favorite drawing or design software. And anything works here, Creta, Gim, Photoshop, Procreate, whatever you like the most and you actually know how to use. Alternatively, if you don't have a software or you don't know how to use one, you can also just put some drips of paint next to each other on a piece of paper or scribble with colored pencils. I just made this file to make it as simple as possible for the software users. So just do whatever is the most comfortable for you. Literally, all you have to do is fill these boxes with well chosen colors that fit the theme. So we got three different color palettes with a different amount of colors and different topics. One palette with four colors that's supposed to look flashy and modern, one with seven colors lively and authentic, and one with six colors that's supposed to look calm and classy. You can probably already tell that each of these palettes would be most useful in a different situation. The first one flashy and modern has only four colors, so that would be fitting for a startup logo, an outfit or maybe a website. The second one lively and authentic has seven colors, so that would be more fitting for a big artwork with a lot going on, perhaps. See if you can find a colour combination that works for that and fits these terms. And the last one with six colors is split into three segments at 603010. So that one would be useful for a website or a room, but possibly also an elegant outfit or something. I know the task looks simple, but that's why you should be very precise with your color selection. Really think about which colors would make, in your opinion, a color palette that fits these terms, flashy and modern and so on, and make them look harmonious, of course. Try to apply all the knowledge from this course. If you forgot something, just rewatch the according lesson. Everything you need is here, so use this opportunity and practice your newly acquired skills. This will help you manifest what you've learned so you won't forget about it so quickly, because if there is something that you should have learned from this course, you should be making lots of color palettes in art and design. Maybe you even want to use these palettes for your individual projects. An artwork, a website, maybe an outfit that you want to wear, you name it. And if not, it's just really beneficial if you think about pure color selection at least this one time. I mean, you've watched this whole course, so do this right now and enjoy. Then here is another interesting way to practice color theory. Look at your favorite artworks or designs and try to find out which color scheme they use or try to replicate their color palette. You can do this on your own without my help. So right here, let me show you some of my artworks, and I want you to find out which color scheme I used for each of them. Then I'm going to explain my color choices a little bit. Are you ready? Let's go. Which color scheme did I use here in this abstract artwork? Well, there is just red and black. So it's a clean monochromatic color scheme. We got some very bright and intense red and it glows even more through its contrast with black. So we have lots of tension and energy with these colors, which is the exact same thing that these shapes communicate. So we could say that here, the colors and shapes support each other, which results in a clear and straightforward atmosphere. Then which color scheme is this? That's a bit more tricky. We have purple, and then on the other side, we have variations of light green and light orange. We don't have the direct complimentary color of purple, which would be yellow, but the colors to the sides of it, which makes this a split complimentary color scheme. We have multiple layers with different colors and shapes that flow into each other. The main thing about this artwork is probably the high contrast because we have lots of black and dark purple, and then we have these two bright spots, the eye and the sun. The split complementary color scheme gives a picture a rich and complete look while providing us with different visual areas that we can look at. Alright, what do we have here? Small tip, you just have to count the colors, and then it's pretty obvious. We go green, red, light orange and blue for the main part of the image. So that's four colors, which makes a tetradic or double complementary color scheme. Red and orange for the main subject, which is the foliage and the tree trunk and green and blue for the ground and the sky, which makes the background. So we have a clear separation between different colors here as they appear in different parts of the image. So the picture has many different saturated colors, but it's still clear what's going on, and it's not too overwhelming, I think. Okay, one last picture. Which color scheme did I make use of here? Don't ask me why the candle melts at the bottom. This is my first digital artwork ever. So we have a very warm and harmonious look. The colors pretty much range from orange and brown to red and purple. So we have a big range of analogous colors. But then we also have this tiny bit of green here, which is on the opposite side to all the other colors. So we have analogous colors for, like, 99% of the picture, but then we have this small, small accent. So it's technically a complimentary color scheme. Due to the fact that this is mostly analogous colors, the picture doesn't have too much tension, and it's not too hard on the eye. As you could imagine if I had more green here, then it would probably be a bit too much. But the green part here is very small and also dark, so it fits in very well here. It gives a picture a more complete look and makes it more interesting without interfering with the composition too much. The main contrast and therefore focus point is definitely this very bright candle here because the whole picture has relatively dark values, and this is very light. So we have very simplistic subjects, but I think they still look somewhat pleasing and interesting because of the color choices. A big range of analogous colors to set a clear mood, a value contrast for the focus point and a small accent with a complimentary color to complete the harmony. Alright, these are some examples for how you can play with color and how you can practice applying it. Have fun, and don't forget to make the color palettes. 27. Outro: Alright, this is it. That was everything you need to know to use color like a Pro in art and design. I hope you enjoyed the course. I put a lot of effort into this because this is a topic that I'm very passionate about and I really believe in its importance. So thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Here is one final note that I want you to listen to for a second. I know I've praised color theory a lot, but don't let color theory discourage you from creating truly unique color combinations. Maybe you want to combine purple with light red and make an abstract artwork that maybe looks a bit weird and doesn't follow a traditional color scheme. These wild unorthodox color combinations can often look very interesting, too, especially in abstract art. Color theory simply predicts whether or not people will like your work on average, and color psychology simply predicts which emotions they will feel on average and which effects your colors will probably have. You can make your own color combinations, for example, combine light blue with desaturated pink and some green or whatever. I really don't care. If you like this, if you think this looks good, then maybe your taste is a bit weird, but it's fine. Who am I to tell you which colors to like? You don't always have to apply color theory precisely and use color schemes. But then don't expect other people to like it. Color theory works very well for the most part. So the chance that you enjoy a color combination that cannot be traced back to any color scheme is not that high actually. And there are so many possibilities to create awesome, unique color palettes with the color schemes and harmonies that I've shown you. So you will not run out of ideas so quickly, even if you strictly follow every rule of color theory. But if you like something that is not described by color theory directly, why not go for it? Color theory is just a tool to increase the probability of your work looking pleasing to other people. So if you only make self expressive art, then color theory may only be a shortcut to arrive at a point where you like your work, which happens to me a lot, or it may be useless, and you just do whatever you want. But in marketing and design, where you speak to many people, it cannot be compromised. Color theory is your tool to efficiently make visuals pleasing and to influence how people think about your products. So if you have anything to add, any ideas, any comments, leave a review and tell me about it. This is very useful for me because I always like to improve. So yeah, I'd be very grateful to see yours. And once again, thank you so much for participating in the course. I really appreciate it. Don't forget to download the PDF files with the most important theories summarized. I recommend you immediately apply what you've learned and test your new knowledge in practice. Maybe just make a spontaneous abstract artwork with random shapes. Test if you can make it look pleasing simply by applying a good color palette. Just an idea. Also, don't worry if at the start your colors are maybe not as perfect as you imagine them to be. Color can be understood. That's why I made this course, but it can still be practice, too. It's not that easy to immediately put everything into practice if you've never worked with color theory before, which is good because you can get better and better at using it. You can improve your intuition for choosing colors, using them intentionally, achieving certain effects, and making your artworks or designs more pleasing. Color alone can make an image great as I look at abstract art shows. I'm not trying to say that color can save everything, but honestly, it can save almost everything. So don't overcomplicate things in your work. Always focus on good color harmony and contrast. Make a color palette, avoid the color errors that I've shown you, and maybe even add a little bit of color symbolism. Everything you need is in this course, so feel free to return and rewatch the important lessons. With that being said, I hope you have a good day and have fun creating. Let's make things look better.