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Oil Painting Part 3

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 Introduction:

Welcome back to another issue on oil painting. This time lets us study colors. every art student should have knowledge about color theory. Many people think that they know all about colors, but when they need to take a decision based on color their analysis and result are far less.

Their will be many situation during your painting session that you will use colors to solve many compositional problems. Some times colors helps more than lines to express your theme of the painting.

Colors: Technically colors are pigments of colors, that are manufactured in large quantities from various raw materials. Colors is always a subject of mystery for scientist and color theorist. Many color wheels were designed in the past but only a few are used today.

The three primaries:

There are three primaries that will produce the magical list of colors. The three primaries are red, yellow and blue. The combination of these colors produce the following secondary colors. Refer figure 1 color wheel.

 

Red + Yellow = Orange

Red + Blue = Violet

Blue + Yellow = Green

The combination of secondary with primaries produces tertiary colors. And at the same time color has temperatures. – warm colors and cool colors. Warm colors are from red to yellow in the color wheel. These colors brings the subject closer to the viewer. Where as the cool colors are from blue to green in the color wheel . These colors sends the subjects far away from the viewer.

To understand the color theory and color mixing lets us try an experiment. Take a canvas of size 1 feet by 1 feet. This is enough for this experiment. Using pencil make a make a grid of 2 cm by 2 cm. As shown in figure 2.

Apply the three primaries, secondary and the tertiary colors in each grid. Once you have done it, take any color and mix with another color and see the final mix. Apply it in the next grid. Complete all the grid and view it from a distance. You will be able to understand how many colors can be produced and how beautiful the grid looks.

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The Magic Spectrum

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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,

  1. Additive colors
  2. Subtractive colors

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.

  1. warm colors
  2. cool 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.

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