Hey all!
Over the past week I've been hitting the books (metaphorically speaking) and getting back to the basics of fine art and art theory. The first subject that I wanted to revisit and do a deep dive on was color theory. I have a decent intuitive sense of what colors I like and what goes well together, but I knew I needed a more robust and structured understanding of WHY.
To start off, I made a monochromatic greyscale practice image that I could tweak at will to play with different color combinations and harmonies.
First were the analogous colors, or in other words, colors that are adjacent to each other on a color wheel to make a nice smooth gradient. Green to orange on the left, red-violet to orange in the middle, and blue-violet to teal on the right. I picked colors that had varying levels of inherent value contrast without aiming specifically for contrasting colors.
Of course, then we move on to contrasting colors. I ended up sampling some of my favorite colors (aqua, magenta, yellow, and teal) and pairing them with a color directly opposite them on the color wheel. I'm most fond of the magenta and blue green color combination, but least fond of the yellow and sapphire blue.
Lastly, I went and did two triadic and one tetradic color scheme. The only one of these I really like is the middle one, but perhaps adjusting the value of the colors may help these types of color harmonies look less jarring to my eyes. Or it might just be that my brain doesn't like triads or tetrads, and that's okay! As long as I understand the rules, I have free reign to bend them creatively and intentionally.
Speaking of value, I also went and made a practice piece where I gave myself a limited palette and created harmony by adding and adjusting the lightness and darkness of the hues to make it feel complete. I tried also to keep the saturation of the palette in mind and focused more on having a more muted, earthy palette than one with really bright, eye-catching colors.
The opposite can be said for this piece, where I opted for a palette with an overall high level of saturation in my hues and two sets of analogous schemes that contrasted with each other (indigo to green, and magenta to orange). Originally this was from a photograph my family took while out hiking on a cloudy day, so the natural palette was full of very dull, low saturation colors, which I decided to intentionally flip on its head and see how it went. I'm very happy with it!
Thank you all for popping by and reading to the end. Look forward to another write-up next week where I keep chugging along on the color theory train.
<3 Crystal
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