Painter’s Hub

Introduction:

“There is no blue without yellow and without orange.” — Vincent Van Gogh. Color is around us and we will be always spellbound by its nature. We have used colors in our daily life from the pre historic period to the current contemporary age. Each country, culture, tradition, community, people have their own unique significance, when color is studied.

Many scientist, artists, philosophers study colors and they are amazed to see the factual nature of colors. Each time you study colors you learn something new. Here we will look into this enthralling subject.

The three primaries…

Before we study about colors we need to understand the color wheel, an astonishing and simple device to understand its true nature. There are two types of color wheel,

Additive Colors are red, blue and green. These are the three primary colors which gives a set of three secondary colors. Namely yellow, magenta and cyan.

Red + Blue = Magenta
Red + Green = Yellow
Green + Blue = Cyan

Subjective colors are Yellow, Magenta and Cyan. These are the primary colors which gives a set of three secondary colors namely, Red, Blue and Green

Yellow + Magenta = Red
Magenta + Cyan = Blue
Yellow + Cyan = Green

To understand how color theory works we need to understand the history of colors which is a nice an interesting subject we will see this in the next issue. But for now let us understand color more in detail. Generally speaking we have two different types of colors.

Warm colors are those colors which gives us a feeling of hot or temperate. Where as cools colors gives us a feeling of icy or cold. Red, brown, yellow comes under warm colors and blue, green comes under cool colors. They are many more colors that are categorized in warm and cool colors.

These primaries are very important since with these we get three secondary colors and subsequently when you add primary and secondary colors you get more colors called as tertiary color. We will look into the next section in the next issue.