or, “What you learned in art class is wacko!”
Have you ever wondered why there are two hot primaries and only one cold, but there are two cold secondaries and only one hot. Weirdness! Well, read on for enlightenment on these and other color condundrums.
I’ve never liked color wheels. Until our current (4th) year at Firstlight, we haven’t even made anything that resemles one in classes. This week we are making something that does indeed, sort of resemble one.
The fact is, that the color wheel is old and a bit flawed. It was first created by Sir Isaac Newton, and revised only a few times until the modern age, when color has now been delegated to a few simplistic systems in two basic forms. One is color from light, or Additive, and uses the Red/Blue/Green model (Screens use this). Light is scientific and all the scientists have done a pretty good job at getting color from light seriously figured out with their millions of variations. Computers use 6-digit numbers that define a boatlaod of them.
The other form of color is from pigments, or Subtractive, and uses several different models and gets all kind of confusing. The pigment model is used for artistic medium, like paints, pencils and pastels.
Since we are artists, we are only interested in color by way of pigments. So, now we can forget all about lights, RBG, that additive vs. subractive junk, blah, blah, and just focus on the pigment form of color, which is a lot more fun.
The whole confusion thing seems to be a result of the need for humans having to fit everything into a perfect model. Guys love models, and every color model was created by a guy. “Hey look!” you can almost hear Newton (and all those other guys who came after him), say, “my color wheel shows how color never ends, it just goes round and round forever. Isn’t that cool?”
Color is predictable, yet being extremely complex, cannot really be tamed by a simple geometric model. Squeezing the way that pigments work together, and how color is percieved, into a circle, or a couple of triangles, or even a 3D lattice work, is nearly impossible.
However, it can also be very helpful, and that is why we have the color wheel.
The color wheel of today, as everyone knows, uses 3 primaries, 3 secondaries, and 6 happy little tertiaries. How tidy. But why then do we have two blues? Why is printing all done with magenta, and what the heck is magenta anyway? What happend to plain old red?
Go to the art store and you will see a choice of reds: Crimson, Crimson Lake, Rose, Rose Madder, Purple Rose, Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium red light, Cadmium medium, and dark, Cadmium red hue, Napthol Red, Pyrrole Red, and on and on. So which one of these is red? Which one should I buy and paint with. Do I need all of them?
And which one is the real red that sits on the red spot in the color wheel and supposedly can’t be made from any other colors?
There is no easy, simple answer to these questions, and so they have generally gone unanswered for the sake of the simple model. Every pigment is different. Every brand of paint is different. Oil is different than acrylic.
Red, as in the basic fire-engine version we know and love, is actually a mix of two different kinds of reds on my palette. Magenta and light Pyrrole red combine to make it. Blue is the same. A light blue, like Cyan, mixes with a dark blue, like Ultramarine, to make the basic royal blue of most color wheels. The two blues are actually two distinct colors and are both primary, meaning that one cannot be used to make the other. The reds are distinct as well.
Yeah, that pretty much blows away a lot of what you knew about color wheels from grade-school art. But it is true, that blue is a primary, there are just two of them. Surprise! you have twins. From now on, when saying red, blue or yellow, I will use a plural for the primary colors. Each of the the twin primaries has a warm twin and a cool twin relative to each other. (way too many puns in this paragraph).
And speaking of that, you also probably know that there are hot colors and cold colors. What no one talks about, is that the primaries are unbalanced, with two hot colors, reds and yellows, and only one cold color, the blues. Why then are the full 6 colors of primaries and secondaries all split into 3 hot and 3 cold colors? Well, because it’s just all so neat and tidy, that’s why. OK, and the fact that blue is a dominating pigment. Blue pigment added to a color makes it instantly cool. Just not cold. There should be hot, warm, cool, and cold, with more on the hot side. Note that I said pigment, not color. Red tends to be a dominant color visually, but blue pigments affect reds and yellows more strongly than the reverse. Most of the time. Usually.
There are not a lot of perfect rules in the world of art. Get over it. For instance, there are not really two distinct yellows. You can make the deep warmer yellow out of the lighter, cooler yellow. Also, several pigments are in-between the two reds or two blues, and some are actually off the chart somewhere in the nether regions.
Which brings us to my main point – A tool for artists should be non-conforming. (Like me!)
The color wheel for an artist should be tailored to their own palette and useful for seeing how their own pigments behave.
Every artist needs to make their own color wheel or similar device for each of their painting mediums. I have made a color star (more on why I like that better than a wheel later), that works well for my own palette of 10 pigment tube colors in acrylics. I will make another color star for oil, and another for watercolor. I use different pigments in each medium, so I’ll need a different star for each.
a better color model
The Firstlight Color Star
However, the basic star that I’ve designed works well as a framework for tailoring each artist’s pigments into a wheel-like structure that is much more useful than a conforming sort of standardized wheel. By taking into account the 3 sets of twin primaries, and the corresponding 3 sets of twin secondaries, and using whatever pigments each artist uses to represent those twins, the star shows artists how the colors that they paint with are going to work. It’s not a completely perfect model for color, but it does help define and organize your pigments in a way that is more understandable.
The simplified color wheel we use today, with these 6 primaries and secondaries, is still useful. Without the wheel, it would be hard to quickly find a complimentary (opposite) color. All you have to do is look at a color wheel, and find your first color. Right across the middle, on the opposite side of the wheel is the complimentary color. this makes figuring out that blue-green and red-orange are opposites, fast and easy.
But I didn’t think it was fastest and easiest, so I made it into a star with 6 big points, and 6 small points for the tertiary colors. Each large point is divided in two, like the two sides of a flower petal, with the twin colors residing on their favorite sides. (“favorite? What do you mean? Why do you keep saying weird things?” – I’ll explain momentarily). See the diagram. You’ll see that the points are easier to use than an ambiguous spot on a wheel, where all the colors blend, and some are in different spots than other wheels have them because of the different kinds of blues and reds. You can also see the basic in-between colors that are made by mixing the two twins on each star point. Oh, except…
Orange! there aren’t enough variations to warrant a warm and cool version of orange, so the two sides and the mix are all just one simple middle of the road orange. Like I said, there are always exceptions. I wouldn’t want to force orange to fit the mold of the other colors when it doesn’t make sense. I will probably write another post on why one side of my color star has only two pigments and the other side has 5. There’s a lot going on in there. For now, just trust me. Orange is simple. Shoot, it wasn’t even a separate color for centuries. That’s why we call them redheads.
As for the favorites thing, the two blues are each said to have a red or a yellow bias. The lighter Cyan blue has a yellow bias, and the darker Ultramarine blue has a red bias. Magenta has a blue bias, and so on. The star places these in an order that makes the color reside on the side closest to it’s bias, without making it move out of it’s spot as a primary or secondary main color.
The star, (and wheels) also are helpful in allowing one to choose known color schemes. Every colorist knows certain color schemes with 1-4 colors each. If you don’t know them, that’s ok. Just always keep your colors limited to 4 or less for any composition and you will fit into some sort of color scheme. If you like your colors, that means that they must be pretty good. Or you wouldn’t like them, right?
I’m finally happy with the “wheel” now that it has become a star. Once I put all of my pigments on the star all kinds of things began to make sense, that were just brushed under the carpet before. I hope to continue and explain more on this sooner or later, but I think I’m done for now. If you have color questions, you can post them below and maybe I’ll write more sooner.
© 2010 Dennas Davis
That was interesting. Had to laugh at “guys like models” tho.
We just did a lesson using hot and cold colors in Betsy’s kidsART class. She found that purples made it very hard to tell where the most important spot was, because all the purples would make a bridge between the hot and cold colors. I think that’s really interesting, and backs up the idea that purple is not a cold color. It should probably be called a tepid color. ha.
Purple is a good substitute for grey too, when you want more lively color, and is great in shadows.