Hello and welcome to this Atelier to your course on color, it's going to be split into

essentially three di erent lessons.

The rst lesson is going to be color theory, you could alternatively call this section color
theory that I actually use. The primary reason for that distinction is because I nd there
are plenty of scienti c color concepts that while super interesting, actually make very little
impact on my day-to-day practice as an artist, or for that matter when I was a student
myself,

the second lesson is going to be about how these color theory concepts relate to our
practical reality on the palate using oil paint. The reason I make this distinction is that lots
of times primary colors, and the primary representatives that we have on the palate,
actually are two very di erent things. The vermillion that I typically use, for instance, has
very little to do with a primary red in the same way that a secondary orange represented
on the color wheel also has relatively little to do with the mixture of my vermilion extra,
and my old Holland yellow-brown. So we will start with the concepts. We'll bring those
concepts then into realistic parameters. And then

the third lesson is going to be a practical application of these color concepts to an oil
painting, the exercises themselves are going to be super simple. What I want us to be
focused on is color relationships, color mixing, and color recognition rather than some big
Baroque composition.

All that now being said, let's get into the actual lecture itself, I'd recommend you to grab
your notebook and pencil so that you can write these things down, making sure that you
have a higher level of assimilation. By the time we get to the end.

The rst thing that we're going to do is make sure that we're all on the same page. In
terms of the absolute basics of color theory, we're going to start out by talking about
primary colors, of which there are three, we have red, which is a primary color, yellow,
which is a primary color, and blue is also a primary color.

It's these three primary colors that we use to combine together and make the secondary
colors, we have green, we have orange, and we have violet. If we take our primary colors,
and mix them with another primary color, we're going to wind up at a place where we
have one of these secondary colors. So yellow and blue, together makes green, yellow
and red together, of course, making orange and red mixed together with blue is gonna
give us violet. So far, super simple right?

Now a tertiary color is essentially two additional steps down the line from a primary color.
And we get them by mixing a secondary and a primary. So yellow mixed together with
green is going to give us our rst tertiary color, and that is yellow-green. Our second
tertiary color is yellow-orange. Our third tertiary color is red-orange. After that, we have
red violet, we have blue, violet, and we have blue-green.

So to review, we have three primary colors. We also have three secondary colors. And we
have six tertiary colors. This is color wheel vocabulary at its most basic.

The next thing we're going to talk about in this most basic color wheel that we have here
is something that I think is probably one of the most important topics that you'll need to
assimilate moving forward. And that is understanding the basic divide between warm and
cool colors. Now, this is a technical division, we're not talking here about colors that feel
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 warm, or conjure up some warm emotion, we're talking about proximity on the color
wheel to blue or orange.

, what I'm going to do is split the color wheel down this axis. On one side of this, we have
warm colors. And on the other side cool, there are probably a lot of di erent ways that we
can explain the warm, cool concept. But let's just say that colors that contain some
noticeable quantity of blue are going to be considered cool. Whereas those not containing
that noticeable quantity of blue are going to be warm colors. We could argue Of course,
that this color here, which is a red violet is somewhat of an interloper in the warmth
section. This would be characterised on a palette by a color like alizarin crimson, I've
often heard it described by students as being a kind of cool red, which of course is a little
bit of an oxymoron, you can't have a cool red. Nonetheless, we do have the feeling that it
has a little bit more of a touch of blue than any other color on the warm side of the color
wheel. Now,
why is the warm, cool distinction so important? It de nes a lot of the di erent e ects that
you're going to be shooting for when you're making your oil paintings. colors appear most
likely to our eye when they're juxtaposed against their opposite.

let's talk analogous colors. If we have one color that we start with the colors immediately
anking it on the color wheel are analogous to that color. So in this case, yellow, orange,
red, orange, and orange are analogous colors. And all of the other colors on the color
wheel follow suit with that same idea.

Now let's talk complementary colors. A complementary color is the colors that we nd
across from another on the color wheel. It's interesting to note that the three primary
colors do not have complements among themselves, they are essentially a triad. But once
we include secondaries and Tertiaries, we have opportunities to have complementary
colors, the complement to blue, then it's going to be orange, yellow is going to be violet
red is going to be green, blue, violet is going to be yellow, orange, red, violet is going to
be yellow, green, and blue-green is going to be red-orange. The reason it's important to
know the mechanics of complementary colors is that one color will neutralise the other in
terms of saturation. So if we have a very highly saturated yellow, and we want to
neutralise it, we would reach for whatever we had on the palette that could equate to a
violet. A lot of times in practical terms, that's going to be a mixture of something like a
cobalt blue, and a vermillion. mix those two, you essentially get the most violet color you
can which will act as a complement to yellow, and will this decrease or neutralise the
saturation of that yellow.

Another term to know is split complement. What we're talking about here goes one step
past the complementary relationship between a color like yellow and violet, and says
actually, that blue-violet and red violet are the split complements of yellow. So essentially
start with one color, nd its complementary color, look to the left and right of it and you
will have the split complements of that color.

The next word we're going to de ne I think gets misused a lot. We're going to talk about
the word hue. A lot of times people will use the word hue to describe a color, they'll say
that orange is a hue Red, Orange is a hue red is a hue. And while that's not entirely
incorrect, it's also not quite speci cally what hue means. The word hue describes which
of the 12 wavelengths of color is the dominant wavelength of a color, it becomes
important because eventually, a lot of the colors that we see aren't presented to us in
such a way that they are at their purest expression. A lot of times green in a painting or in
nature will be expressed in a very low saturation, which almost makes it look like a gray.
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 But here we can still say this is a green, because the dominant color in that mixture, the
one that stands out is green.

So in this case, the hue is green. Also, in this case, the hue is green. This will become
more important later when we start talking about the three-dimensional color space.

The next thing you need to know is value. What do we mean when we say the word value,
what we're talking about is on a grayscale, what is the lightness or darkness of a
particular color. Each of the colors then is assigned a speci c value. This becomes
particularly important for an oil painter when you're trying to balance Hue value and
Chroma without making your mixture too dark or too light.

Brie y I want to talk about tinting and shading. If we start with a color, like this one red,
and we add white to that color, we have created a series of tints of the color red, if we
add black to that color, we have various shades of red,

I nd that tinting and shading, it's a little bit of a design term, meaning that it has more of
an impact if you're working on computers, or with some theoretical expression of color.
By that I mean I would rarely simply darken red by adding black to it no more than I would
just darken yellow by adding black to it. Even simple additions like that can a ect the
ultimate expression of the color. And you would like to be much more speci c than simply
adding a bunch of white or adding a bunch of black if you want to lighten or darken the
color. Finally, there's one more term in this genre and that's going to be tone. A tone is
simply adding a series of Gray's to that color, in this case, a darker grey, in this case, a
lighter grey. So that's it for tints, tones and shades.

the Munsell color system. Munsell himself was an artist and scientist. And he was
dissatis ed with the lack of speci city in the way that we could talk about colors. So
rather than sticking with the at expressions of color that were o ered at that time in
history, like the color wheel and color triangle, he developed a three-dimensional concept
for color

Chroma is almost synonymous with saturation. And what we're talking about is how pure
the particular expression of a color is.

In the last part of this lesson, I want to present to you some of the ideas that are
associated with colors. What we're talking about here is Color Psychology. What that
means, of course, is that there is a subliminal link between particular colors, and di erent
kinds of emotions. I understand, of course, these are all disputed territories, and what one
color means to one person isn't necessarily what it means to another. But let's play the
numbers here and say, on average, the data tells us that these colors have a particular
e ect on people generally,
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The easiest one to de ne is going to be red. When we use red in a composition or design.
Usually, we're using it to denote action, passion, energy, excitement, strength, adventure,
and love.

Orange: optimism, enthusiasm, freedom, originality, pleasure, youth.

Yellow: joy, warmth, positivity, happiness, clarity, curiosity, fun.

Green: nature, luck, harmony, loyalty, safety, prosperity, and health.

Blue: trust, power, con dence, loyalty, success, security, and purpose.

Purple: mystery, fantasy, imagination, royalty, spirituality, justice, art.

Pink: creativity, respect, softness, gratitude, intuition, calm.

This sums up the theoretical section of my color theory course. And I want you to know
that I understand it is abridged. What I wanted to present to you here is color theory that I
actually use as a painter every single day. There's plenty more to know about the topic.
There are entire books and entire encyclopedias written about it, but a lot of times that
excessive knowledge can be a little bit impenetrable. So this is your beginner's guide to
color theory.

In the next section, we're going to get our boots onto the ground. We're going to start
mixing colors using the palette that we've designated for this purpose…
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