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Chris has a master's degree in history and teaches at the University of Northern Colorado.
Look around you. Chances are, the world around you is full of colors. While we're pretty used to seeing a multitude of colors in our daily lives, the fact that so many colors actually exist is pretty incredible when you think about it. What our eyes interpret as colors is a result of waves of light bouncing off of tiny chemicals within objects called pigments. Pigments absorb certain kinds of light, but reflect others. The colors that are reflected are the ones that reach our eyes.
However, for all of this complexity, all the colors we see are really just a combination of a few basic colors, mixed in different ways. Colors from pure light mix differently than those that come from things with pigments, like paint, so for now we're just going to focus on pigment-based colors, the ones artists use to create their masterpieces. The world is full of colors, and capturing them in a painting means you need to know how colors are made.
Let's start at the most basic unit of colors. A primary color is one that cannot be created by combining any other color. You may look around you and assume that there are dozens of primary colors, but in fact there are only three. Every other color you see in a painting is created from a combination of these three colors.
So, what are they? The three primary colors are blue, red, and yellow. These hues cannot be created by blending or mixing any other colors. When dealing with digital media, you may often see these colors labeled as cyan, magenta, and yellow. Since our computers use light to blend colors, and not physical solutions with pigments, the primary colors are slightly different.
Artists create physical, tangible colors like those in paints and dyes by mixing various amounts of primary colors. While it may seem incredible, we can create any color on a color wheel just by mixing these three colors, along with white and black. Traditionally, white and black aren't considered primary colors because they imply an absence of color or a combination of all the colors. Generally, artists build up a full palette of color gradually, by combining primary colors in consistent ways.
The first step in this process is to use primary colors to make secondary colors, or those created by mixing equal amounts of two primary colors. If you're looking at the colors on a color wheel, you'll find the secondary colors exactly halfway between the primary colors. For example, if you mix the primary colors yellow and red, you get orange. If you mix equal amounts of red and blue, you get purple, and if you mix equal amounts of blue and yellow, you end up with green. Those are the secondary colors. From there, artists can mix in more of any primary color to change the hue and imitate any color of the natural world in paint.
It's pretty amazing that we can see so many colors, but even more incredible that we are able to replicate them. The colors we see are a result of various chemicals called pigments that either reflect or absorb waves of light, which is how paints get their colors. All colors are made by mixing various amounts of primary colors, which cannot be created by mixing other colors together. They include blue, yellow, and red or cyan, yellow, and magenta in digital media, since computers mix color with light, not pigments.
By mixing primary colors in equal amounts, we get the secondary colors orange, green, and purple, which in turn allow us to replicate any color in the natural world. Our pigment-based colors are pretty incredible, pretty awesome, and perhaps most importantly for artists, simply pretty.
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Art, Music, and Architecture Around the World17 chapters | 231 lessons
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