Understanding Color

If you want to paint realistically, you have to understand color.  But it’s difficult to explain color mixing without a basic way to discuss the terms and challenges.

Way back, even in grade school, everyone got the color wheel.  After just a couple experiments, even my daughters understood the color wheel and how to apply it.  But try using that for naturalistic painting and you find pretty quickly that it can’t describe all of the challenges of modeling, or overall color harmony, or predict the next natural color to use.

There have been several “color spaces” proposed over the years, that do the color wheel one better.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space#Partial_list_of_color_spaces  Since there are so many applications of color - from painting, to film and video games, to magazine printing, to manufacturing, and on and on - there are many color spaces dedicated to individual pursuits.  For the purposes of painting, the HVC (hue value chroma) model is fairly easy to understand, and is more sophisticated than the color wheel alone. 

This site: http://www.huevaluechroma.com/011.php does a great job of explaining it.  It took a couple reads to get all the words straight in my mind, to be honest, but the color mixing is maybe located in another part of the brain.  But that sort of explanation is more or less where we’re coming from when we talk about color.