Color Theory 101

In your first-ever art classes (and I’m talking about a kindergarten level here), you were likely introduced to the color wheel. While this ring of colors may seem elementary, the color wheel is actually an incredible tool to keep in mind while painting and is often considered the cornerstone of color theory.

The Power of the Color Wheel

A color wheel represents the relationships between different colors, making it easy to identify primary, secondary, and tertiary colors alongside analogous and complementary colors.

Primary Colors

The three primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) form the central spokes of the color wheel. From these colors, you can build all the others! Mixing two primary colors together creates a secondary color: mix red and blue and you have violet; blue and yellow, green; red and yellow, orange. Tertiary colors fill the final slots in our color wheel; these colors are made by combining a primary and a secondary color to create nuanced in-between hues like red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet, and red-violet. 

Analogous and Complimentary Colors

Analogous colors are any three colors that are next to each other on the color wheel (for instance, green, yellow-green, and yellow or red, red-violet, and violet). Because these colors share similar qualities, they look beautiful when painted alongside each other. Using analogous colors rather than a single hue can also help add vibrancy and interest to a painting.

Complimentary colors are directly opposite each other on the color wheel (like red and green or blue and orange). When painted next to each other wet-on-dry, they create highly contrasted scenes where each color seems brighter or more saturated. When mixed together, complementary colors desaturate each other, creating beautiful neutral shades. I often like to use my subject’s complementary color to create an underpainting to lay the groundwork for my shadows.

Temperature

Temperature refers to how warm or cool a color is. Warm colors typically have undertones (or an underlying quality) of yellow or red, while cool colors often have blue undertones.

Generally speaking, there are warm and cool colors. Red, orange, and yellow are all warm colors that you might find in fire, while blue, purple, and green are cool colors you may associate with water. However, having said that, each individual color can lean relatively warm or cool. For instance, red is classified as a warm color. But within that, you can use a warmer red like Winsor Red with yellow undertones, or a cooler red like Alizarin Crimson with blue undertones. The same can be said for any color: there are warm blues (like Cerulean) and cool blues (like Ultramarine), warm yellows (like Cadmium Yellow) and cool ones (like Lemon Yellow), and so on and so forth.

As you expand your watercolor palette, try to have a warm and cool version of each color. This will allow for an optimal amount of color mixes with varied temperatures and tones. Experiment with painting in entirely warm or cool palettes, and play with the different depths you can achieve by combining warm and cool colors in the same painting.  You can also always adjust the temperature of your subject by applying a warm or cool glaze, one of my favorite techniques.

Value

As mentioned in the last post, value is how light or dark a color is. Because watercolors are a water-based medium, you can easily change the value of a color by adjusting the water-to-paint ratio. Adding more water lightens the value and adding less water darkens the value. Adding additional paint to a mix also darkens the value. You can create value scales for every color; creating various value scales can be a wonderful way to experiment with your paints and better understand hues that are new to your palette.

Hue, Shade, Tint, and Tone

Specific color theory terms can sometimes get confusing—especially because many have multiple meanings! So let’s get some definitions out of the way:

Hue – the pure color (think about any color right out of the tube or pan)

Shade – hue + black (creates a darker value); can also refer to slight variations in hues (for instance, you could create a painting with various shades of purple, created not just by adding black but by adding different hues to achieve those different shades of purple)

Tint – hue + white (creates a lighter value); can also refer more generally to different variations in color (in the same way as shade)

Tone – hue + grey; can also refer to the characteristics of a color or indicate the unique qualities of a color (how warm or cool, bright or dull, light or dark, etc.)

When painting, layering different shades, tints, and tones of your central hue can help make your subject appear more three-dimensional.

Intensity

The intensity of a color is also known as its saturation. There are many different ways to adjust the saturation of a color:

• If you want to saturate the color and darken the value, use less water in your mix
• If you want to saturate the color and slightly darken the value, add a glaze of the same color or an analogous color
• If you want to saturate the color without darkening the value, use higher-quality paints with strong pigments
• If you want to desaturate the color and darken the value, add the complimentary color
• If you want to desaturate the color and lighten the value, add white.

While it can be fun to paint only using bright, saturated colors, using different levels of intensity can help add depth and realism to your paintings. For instance, reserving the most saturated colors for the focal point of your painting can help draw your viewer’s eye directly where you want it. Using more muted tones for the shadows can help add dimension without stealing the spotlight from your focal point. Similarly, using less saturated colors for your backgrounds can help distant objects appear further away; making objects that are closer to your viewer more saturated can help establish your foreground.