Of all the visual elements we deal with, color is the one that baffles most folks. That's not surprising when we consider all the tube names for colors, the color index numbers that so
many these days depend upon, the difference in pigments and the system used by color printers as well as the digital indications for colors. No wonder, folks get confused! As far back as we have written records, color is discussed with two sets of words: one that labels the hue of the color and another that identifies its source. One example written in the 1400's is Cennino Cennini's The Book of Art, in which he outlines in detail every color used at that time, the material it is derived from and how it is processed. Compare this with today's Color Index and all its technical jargon. All the various discourses and theories are consistent only with the traditional labels for color: yellow, orange, red, violet, blue, green, and their tertiary combinations. In my
experience, we can best understand color by sticking to those labels. These labels - yellow, orange, red, violet, blue, green - actually indicate only the pure hues of our primaries and secondaries. So when we say something is blue, we're not communicating any more than the hue of blue. We're not distinguishing whether it is a light or dark blue, nor which saturation of blue it is, nor whether that blue leans a bit towards green or a bit towards
violet. All we are saying is that there is mostly blue there. But that hue might be taking on one of the hues on either side of the blue on the color wheel. Most folks refer to the sky as blue. In the sky below we do see a lot of blue, but that's not all we see. That blue has some green it . And more, we can easily see that this sky has at least three different values of blue where I have circled. Number 1 is darker in value than 2 and 3 Not only that, but this sky blue is only
partially saturated. Here are those value sections with a splotch of the fully saturated version of this blue at its value. To take this dissection one step further, the sky blue here is actually the tertiary blue-green. The largest percentage of hues we see lean towards other hues, so the tertiary blue-green might differ from color to color in just how much green it contains. Here are a few samplings we might see. (I ripped these off Google search.) And this just represents one side of the hue of blue. But here's the fun part: we can observe all this in terms of blue without being confused with index numbers or tube names or ink colors or the digital RGB or CMYK
syndromes. It's a simple way of looking at one side of blue. That same principle is true for
every hue on the traditional color wheel! Enjoy a fun weekend of finding multiple kinds of blue! During my Language of Painting series, I explained the role of our visual elements. If you'd like to review those roles to better understand the behavior of elements, here are the links to each of those
discussions: Color --Value -- Shape -- Texture -- Size -- Line and Direction
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