📦 Learning about Color

And how I built a color palette

Today we’re going to talk about color.

Readers will get the

• basic color terms with some commentary.

• And a great insight about working with colour digitally from my Instagram friend Melissa Gardner

• Useful links

And on top of that Subscribers will get

• To Learn how I selected the colors

• Clues for creating your own colour palette

☕️ In art school I hated color theory, the exercises were so tedious, and trying to get everything perfect was not fun at all. I did submit something good enough, but the thing that bugged me about the whole process was that if I did it right, I would get the same answer as everyone else who did it right.

This is not a class on color, I just want to give anyone who’s a beginner the terms to understand what I’m going to talk about in the Subscribers section.

Color Theory -ish

1. There is something called a color wheel, there are a few versions but each layout colors in a way that demonstrates their relationship to one another. I only have a basic understanding of all this, and I like it this way to allow for a more intuitive approach, but some basic knowledge is helpful

2. Hue means color, if you are talking about paint it’s referring to pigment colour. More technically it’s “the degree to which a stimulus can be described as similar to or different from stimuli that are described as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet,"[1] within certain theories of color vision.”

3. Saturation gives a color brightness or dullness, which impacts the vibrance of the color.[9]

4. Values, tints, and shades of colors are created by adding black to a color for a shade and white for a tint. Creating a tint or shade of color reduces the saturation.[9]

5. Color contrasts are studied with a pair of colors, as opposed to color harmony, which studies a set of colors. In color contrasting, two colors with perceivable differences in aspects such as luminance, or saturation, are placed side by side to create contrast.[citation needed]

   Johannes Itten presented seven kinds of color contrasts: contrast of light and dark, contrast of hue, contrast of temperature, contrast of saturation, simultaneous contrast, contrast of sizes, and contrast of complementary.[8] These seven kinds of color contrasts have inspired past works involving color schemes in design.[8]

The problem with digital color

Melissa Gardner pointed out to me that the problem with digital color is that we have virtually unlimited choice. Imagine having thousands of shades of green color pencils to pick from every time you wanted to color anything. And if you wanted a yellow you have another thousand choices to pick from. The chances of your picks working as well together as they could are low.

In the following section, I go through the steps I took to build a color palette where all the colors related to each other.

If you’re looking for a step-by-step education that guides you through creating your own palette I recommend Tom Froese’s Skillshare Class

Let’s crossover to how I built a color palette. Hope to see you on the other side!