Color is Relative

After a couple of weeks working with acrylics, I have realized far too painfully how this is true. Learning color is a tremendously difficult feat. My perception and critical thinking has been so stretched in this class.

After photographing, I realized that a lot of my colors have chaffed. The Lunar new year break will be spent repainting those. On the left is one of several pages that catalogs my paints straight from the tube.

And it’s not noticeable on photo, but I would have to redo all of my greens and violets. The value is not the same with the rest of my wheel.

Things that I have learned so far (though I am ashamed that I hadn’t figured this out before. It seems so obvious now):

• I had to mix to get the perfect primary colors. It sounds ridiculous but the first thing you notice when handling acrylic is that the blues and greens are translucent upon first application. If you keep applying layers until it becomes opaque, you’ll get a blackish saturated hue. When making a color wheel, getting the hue right is just one end of the spectrum. You have to get the values the same across the board. So I had to mix white with several variations of blue paint. Which brings me to….
• Mentally imagining Photoshop to edit my paint mixtures. I remember my professor saying: “This isn’t painting class. It’s color theory.” Mixing and getting to the correct hue and value can’t be done purely by guess-timation. I make my mixing decisions based on previous experience in correcting photographs. Cobalt blue is a tinge yellow in tone while Ultramarine feels violet. I mix these + Cerulean and white to come up with the correct primary blue with the proper value to fit in a color wheel. I guess my method is a mix of the “Hue and Saturation” mode + “Color Balance” + “Selective Color”
• Experiencing the difference of each tube of paint. You just can’t trust all the information printed on the tube. And I’ve been keeping track of how each of my colors react and how things blend with each other. I also do a list of no-no combinations between red blues and yellows that give me a muddy shade. For example, my experience tells me that when you get a brown mess when you mix Cobalt blue with Cadmium Red Light Hue. And when a tube says opaque, It’s often never true. I’ve had weird luck with semi-translucent paint being creamy though.
• 1/2 Pigment A + 1/2 Pigment B =/= Middle Color. I actually learned this while doing a 9 part tonal value grayscale. To get a middle gray, you don’t mix equal parts white and black. Opacity of paints tend to lend a hand in how much you’re supposed to mix to get something. It took time for me to unlearn the supposed mathematics of color. Getting to the right color tests your way of seeing.

There was just an immense load of information that I had to absorb through experience. I really am grateful for my decision to take this class even if my VisCom course in UP could have it credited. I admit to not learning has as much about color back then as I am learning right now. It can be attributed to the follies of youth and not so much the curriculum though. But seriously. COLOR THEORY. It will eat your brains out. And I am thinking that this is just acrylic. I need to do the same thing for personal study with my oils and watercolors when summer break allows it.

Another great recommendation for studying color is Joseph Albers’s Interaction of Color. Check out the Designer’s Review of Books for a great preview to it. I’m trying to get my hands on a copy as well.