Colour Theory   Keith  O'Connor    My Writings on Art

Last update  feb  14  2000

This is the fourth in a series of six sections that I am developing in unison. Even though they are at the  work in progress stage I have been asked by fellow artists to present them as is. Every few days I work on one or more of them I will often edit what I have previously written.

Topics discussed in this colour theory section:
    What is colour theory
    Who needs it
    Why do we mix colours?
    balancing the palette
    harmonious groupings
    chromatic colour theory
    tonal colour theory
    a method for creating a tonal scale using pigments
    a nine tone scale in ".jpg" image format  you can save
    study of transparency effects

What is  Color Theory?

Colour theory is a set of principles that increases the probability that the colours you use in a painting form a unified whole in terms of the entire painting.

Place here  Introduce the role of theory and what it is , consider blending theory with direct perceptual experience.

If you are a photo realist painter and you are happy getting  your colour directly from the photograph with few modifications then this is not for you.

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If you paint what you see and you are happy getting your colour directly from the object with few modifications then this is not for you.

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If your are creative and want to go beyond the colours that you see and understand the the approach to colour used by great master painters and brought upto date with modern concepts then this essay may be of help to you.

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It should be noted that the intellectual enquiry into the aesthetics of colour theory has nothing to do with representational  or abstract  painting it applies to all catagories of painting.

Principles of Color Theory

 To assist us in formulating our colour theory I have defined following five catagories of principles : (1) colour mixing theory ; (2) aesthetic color consideration of variety within unity; (3) colour harmony theory;  and (4) colour interaction theory (5) colour thinking

Note: My personal colour system  links colour and tone very closely. Tone is an equally steped series of greys from light to dark. I use a 9 tone system that equates each tone to a correspondg colour. The colour intensity of each colour-tone is sorted into three groups, which will be discussed below.

Colour Mixing Theory

We mix colours for one reason only and that is to obtain a balanced palette.  It is the balanced palette that is the first conceptual step in obtaining colour unity for the entire painting. Colour(s) straight from the tube(s)  differ from each in their intensities; tones and qualities. A selection of raw colours is like the piano that must be tuned before it is played. The artist must know how to tune the colours before even choosing the palette. The palette is a sub-set of the set of all colours.  It is this sub-set of colors that is normally  applied to a specific painting, but  that concept will become clear as we go on.
 
 

(1a)  Balancing  the palette:
 

 I remember as a teenager (1950's) looking at a Windsor and Newton Artists Oil Colour  Chart. I noticed that some of the colours had a quality about them that were similar although the colour was different. They looked like they were related as some level. It was something that I could perceive  with my eyes but had no explanation for. I recall on my numerous trips to the Gallery that many of the colours used in master paintings had the same root quality. What I did not know is How did they do it? That started a twenty year quest.

The answer is in your visual perception system. You have to go to the galleries and look at original master paintings,  focus on each painting's  yellows; reds and blues, looking for a yellow that affects your eyes in a similar fashion to a blue that affects your eye in a similar fashion to a red and it just goes from one to the other. Look for colours that have the same intensity. You will notice that a yellow and blue that have the same intensity are in balance. Colours that don't have common intensities are out of balance. You keep looking at paintings until you can perceive with ease the similarity of intensities between the different colours. You will also note the impact of intensifying small areas of colour in a painting,  but not too much or the colour unity of the whole painting will go out of balance. You return home and practice balancing colours.
 
 

You can only train your perceptual system by looking closely at original master paintings you  are at a disadvantage if you cannot get access to the originals. You would be surprised at the number of great abstract painters who closely studied the colour balancing of old masters. This is something you can acquire only with practice.

There is one further problem with mixing colours. Every colour has a natural tone,  yellow has a light tone and blue a dark tone. So, you have balanced your colours but now you want a light red and a light blue. you add a lightening agent such as white and suddenly they are no longer balanced.  Naturally blue can be lightened and yellow can be darkened to a degree, but when you try to move them up and down the light to dark scale the blue looks like it is a different blue and not just a lighter version of the dark blue. The same thing happens with other colours.

To maintain the balance you will have to invent your own way of keeping the colour quality as it goes up and down the light to dark scale all the while depending upon your visual perceptual system to keep the colour in balance. You will discover that you cannot push every colour as far as you would like . There are limitations as to how far you can push the colour before it goes out of balance.  You may get some useful information from a book titled "The Student's Guide to PAINTING" by Jack Faragasso:   North Light Publishers:  West port Connecticut.

This may complicate your life but another aspect of colour is the pigment it's self. The earth colors depend upon furnace temperature for their color. Variations in furnice temperature  between firings can produce different colors. I have one tube of burnt sienna with it's traditional transparent smooth quality and another tube by the same name with it's contents looking  like powdered iron oxide. Now we have added the quality of the pigment it's self to our levels of color thinking. I put aside the tube of iron oxide like pigment because some day I may want that particular color quality in a painting.

(include here an exercise to help train the eyes)

So, we have discussed how  colours must be unified at the intensity level but varied at the chromatic level. All your mixed colours must be balanced in this fashion.

this section will deal with colour sequences and may be moved to the end.

As I develop this I realize that the sequence of ideas now needs restructuring, but many of my ideas are now present so I will leave it as is until I can restructure.

You know you need to balance your colors to obtain overall color unity, but you may not want all available balanced colors in every painting. So you select a subset of colours from your set of all available balanced colours. The selection of this subset will set the overall color impacrt of your painting. Therefore you want it to be a harmonious subset to maintain the overall colour unity.
 

The most interesting method I have found for selecting from all colours a group of colours from which to form a palette is, described in a book titled  "The Gist of Art"   by John Sloan. American painter: Ash Can School, early 20th century. He used a little known palette called  Dudeen. I don't yet know where it comes from, but it seems to reflect many of the artistic colour theories from the early 19th century through the early part of the 20th century.

It is the only colour system that I have encountered that conforms to the old principle of "building form with neutrals". Colours are organized around three nested equilateral triangles. The innermost triangle denotes neutral colours; the middle triangle denotes
semi-neutreal colours and the outer denotes colour.

In my variation I balance the colours denoted by  the outer triangle and add another triangle beyond the outer which I use to denote unbalanced raw colours.  My system then has four nested equilateral triangles.

Now the system  uses a pythagorean triplet ,(3,4,5), to select  a group of harmonious colours from all the colours contained within the three nested triangles. These pythagorean groups of colours are further grouped into two sets of colors  called Major and Minor chords very much like music. You have the choice of which chord, major,  (a major cord contains one or more primary colours),  or minor, (a minor chord contains no primary colours),  to use for the colour palette of your painting.

You will notice that the pythagorean triplet, (3.4,5) adds up to 12 , the number of different types of colours normally found in a colour wheel.

(4)  A Supplementary Example that I am working on
updated feb  1  2000

Note: colours just out of the tube are not balanced they have unsequenced tones and intensities, it is through a sequencing process which  involves your eyes  that results in balanced colours.

my colour palette:  is not a chromatic palette because purple is not the darkest colour

The idea is to keep adjusting  each colour, using only your eyes,   until it is balanced with it's corresponding grey tone. Also try to make sure that each colour is of a similar intensity by looking at other colours in the row and column. Once the colours are balanced in tone and intensity they form a full set of colours from which you select the subset of colours for a particular painting.
 

It does not matter if you have an eye defect, you balance to your eyes, and there will be a harmony that is consistant with your physiology.

You would go through the same colour balancing process with oil, water colour, acrylic, etc. The following balanced colours (eventually) are electronic colours. they don't have the range that pure pigment colours have.

I am currently just using netscape composer and it is clumsy so eventually I'll have to find a better way of balancing my colours.

(1) You will note that purple is no longer allowed to be darker than blue that's what makes this colour system different than the current popular chromatic systems..
(2)  Colours are balanced to the traditional 9 tone scale. and to each other in terms of intensity.
(3)  Note that the number of inclusive increments from  yellow to blue is 9;  yellow to red is 5 and red to blue is 5. This is the natural sequance and hints at the problems that will be encounterd trying to extend pigment colours beyond their natural position in the scale
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A sample 9 tone scale with corresponding Netscape codes.
 

The first row of 9 tones are ".jpg" images that you may save for your experiments but don't link back or I'll disconnect them.

(1)  The following is an example of tonal colours balanced and  fitted to a 9 tone scale:

note that in this scale no primary colour is  allowed to get darker than it's set tone. When for example yellow and red are mixed the resulting mixtures cannot get darker than the natural tone of red. To move red down to a lower tone blue is added so it now becomes a mixture of red and blue.

9 toned colour scale

(2)  an example of fitting Netscape's fixed colour table to the 9 tone scale

note: Building  your own scales  will provide you with an incredable amount of colour knowlege.

The first thing to notice about the above scales is that the variation in colour intensity, hue, and tone in the No. (1) scale are much less than in the No. (2) scale. The No. (2) scale mimics the variety in tube pigments. Notice the intense red that just pops out. Notice also the 3rd tone of yellow looks like a very different colour than it's neighbours. This is an excellent example of unbalanced colours. You mix colours to balance them  such that individule colours  don't stand out too much from their neighbours. Balanced colours allow you to place a colour in the middle plane and prevent it from jumping into the foreground or retreating to the background plan. This knowledge and skill is so basic to fine art that without it you will never be a competent colourist..

A small story.  A friend of mine loved bright red. He would not listen to my recommendation that he use neutral colours for his office decorantion. He chose a bright red screen as a privacy panel in front of his office desk. After spending a few months in front of that red screen he was going crazy. It took him 5 years before he could escape that bright red screen and he would never have anything to do with red after that.  The moral of the story is, "it looks nice, you may like it, but can you live with it?".  Do not make it a habit to choose colours just because you like them, choose them because they work together.
 
 

Note: discuss colour in the half tones.
 

A Method for  Buliding a Grey Tonal Scale Using Pigments:

Example of a  9 tone ruler with corresponding netscape  codes

Thoughtful studies have indicated that the average person can visually differentiate eleven tones between white a black without undue effort.

Since we want our patterns to be clear and easly understood by the viewer we will construct an eleven tone system as follows:

 We chose a white (acrylic - titanium) and a black (acrylic ivory) as our two extremes and create nine equally distanced tones between those extremes. This has been referred to as a tonal ruler or scale. This should be a simple task, but I do not recall ever seeing an adequate equally spaced tonal ruler in any of the hundreds of art books that I have reviewed. The art students I know have struggled through this exercise without success.

In ancient times the Pythagoreans conducted many a trial and error experiments in discovering the mathematical ratios that defined how long to cut the strings or pipes in order to produce a series of equally spaced notes. I had my eyes tested to make certain that I had no colour or tone perception problems. I then went through hundreds of experiments to arrive at the following numeric sequence that produces a tonal scale of equally separated  tones. (to construct the scale I used acrylic Ivory Black with acrylic Titanium white ) - careful not all blacks and whites are equal.

The mathematical ratio sequence  I eventually defined as: 2(n)/1 for n=0,1,2,3,4,5. This sequence is described in words as follows.  1 unit of white to 1 unit of black is tone 6; 2 units of white to 1 unit of black is tone 5; 4 units of white to 1 unit of black is tone 4; 8 units of white to 1 unit of black is tone 3; 16 units of white to 1 unit of black is tone 2;  32 units of white to 1 unit of black is tone 1: (note that tone 1 is not pure white you still have a white  accent). The five dark tones are the inverse as follows: tone 7 is 2 units of black to 1 unit of white;tone 8 is 4 units of black to 1 unit of white; tone 9 is 8 units of black to 1 unit of white; tone 10 is 16 units of black to 1 unit of white; tone 11 is 32 units of black to 1 unit of white. (Note that tone 11 is not absolutely pure black you still have a black  accent)

Special Note: the tonal ruler is a lot harder to build than to use once it is built.
 
 

will deal with simultaneous contrasts, how one colour interacts with another.

Sample 9 tone ruler with netscape codes

Study of transparency effects, shown below, using shades of grey,  (30,90,170,190), (tones,9, 7, 4, 3), from above tonal ruler.
Note the effect as the intersection area tone is changed to (tones,,3,5,7, 8, 9), in each of the following samples. The light tone plane which begins it's position in the foreground ends the sequence with it's position next to the background.

Note how I use a combination of similarly toned colours to bind the intersecting area first to the light area and secondly to the dark area. Reference above "9 toned colour scale".
 
 

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a tonal system to assist in determining the number of major tones in a painting.
 
 

tones	9	7a	7b	7c	7d	5	5a	3	3a
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

discuss above tonal system in relation to Bottecelli, Raphael, Rembrandt, etc.
Note: Bottecelli's forms used for figures lean more towards "tone group 3a". Raphael used more darks in his forms like " tone groupe 5". Rembrandt forced light against dark more like "tone group 3", and similar to the strong Artifical Light / Shadow tonal relationships below.
 

Lighting  Conditions Expressed as Tonal Relations

	Difused	Light	Hazy Su	nlight	Full  Su	nlight	Strong A	rtifical
tones	Light	Shadow	Light	Shadow	Light	Shadow	Light	Shadow
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Diff		1 tone		2 tones		3 tones		4 tones

Note: estimate the halftones to be halfway between light and shadow.
 
 

to be developed
 
 
 

I will continue to add to this essay, but at this moment  I am in thinking mode.
 
 

I stuff things which may be of later use down here :

They have not been integrated into the essay but I let you see them so you'll get an idea of where I am going.
 

There has been much talk about needing  a pure yellow; a pure blue and a pure red. They don't exist and if they did they would contribute little to the balanced palette. explain why.

The relationship between poetry and painting as intellectually similar art forms
 

form concept of art
 

 describe the chromatic palette
describe the double primaries palette
describe the Dudeen colour harmony system
describe Turners palette
describe the Liquitex Acrylic and Oil Colour map and mixing guide for colour relationships as a variation on the turn of the 20th century Dudeen colour harmony system
 Incorporate Arnheim's theories into the form theory of colour and include Rothko's work.
 describe the notan colour harmony system
describe the dual role of plastic form and colour
explain Constables contribution to colour theory (green in middle ground)
explain tonal theory in terms of shaded columns (Ruskin)

It organizes the common 12 colours around the perimeter of an equilateral triangle. Each of the three primary colours is located at one of the triangle's points. The organization is much like the outer edge of the common colour circle,  but the likeness ends there. There are two nested triangles inside the outer triangle.

1    yellow
2    yellow orange
3    orange
4    red orange
5    red
6    red violet
7    violet
8    blue violet
9    blue
10    blue green
11    green
12    yellow green

Colour Interaction:

We have discussed generally ideas on selecting a group of harmonious colours that will  form the palette for our painting. We have discussed the concept of balanced colours which relates to maintaining a common intensity between colours. We have discussed the concept of maintaining colour consistency as we moved a colour and down a tonal scale.

Now we face the problem of discussing how one colour interacts with another when they are beside each other. The major thing to remember here is simultaneous contrast. Remember we went through the process of cutting the purity of our raw colours in order to bring a number of different colours to a common intensity.  Now by placing certain colours beside each other we can create a new colour by using the method by which our biological perceptual system perceives colours.

A number of impressionists attempted to do this but were not as successful as they had hoped.

You can create  perceptual colours but only under certain conditions. Perceptual colours were considered a problem by many 18th and 19th century artists and was referred to as "activating the neutrals".  The aesthetic idea behind painting was to keep the various coloured layers from moving from one plane to another.  The job was seen as making sure that what ever colour was placed next to another the colours would not leave there position in the paintings layers or planes.  Painting theory was based upon building your forms from a base of neutral colours  to colour articulations. Once the neutrals became activated the perceptual system would perceive them in a different plane and the forms would disintegrate.

 Developing Colour Thinking Concepts:

How do we think about thinking? As children, someone points to a chair says the word "chair" and
Then they point and say that other funny looking object is also a"chair".
In real life we differentiate between chairs by location, we may say the chair in the corner as opposed to a chair at the dinner table.
We can also differentiate between chairs by shape ; colour and textural differences.
. In the real world we have other senses go give us information to supplement our oral description.
In the written word we only have the writers and the readers interpretation of the word signs to complete the communication.
We can never be sure we are interpreting the writers word signs the same way the writer is interpreting them.
Therefore written communication always contains an element of interpretative ambiguity.
This is interpreted as meaning that thinking has this element of ambiguity and requires evaluation.
Let's say I banged my knee and it hurts. I am not thinking that my knee hurts, I personally know that my knee hurts,
because thinking always involves an evaluation between things and I know my knee hurts therefore there
is no requirement for evaluation.

We have worked our way through this simple detailed process in order to bring our basic concepts of "what is thinking" in
line with current philosophical thinking. Your can read this type of thing in Weeeeeeeeger.

If we look at a colour and say it is blue then that is not thinking. If we look at a colour and say it is mostly blue, but has a tinge of red
and has a flat look to it, and is closer to a mid tone than to it's traditional lower tone, and seems to have a transparency about it , yet it is not really opaque.
that is an example of thinking. Our thinking will get deeper as we add levels of difference to our observation, eg texture,simultaneous contrast, etc.
shape, size, patina etc.

Now we are getting deeper into the philosophers question, Is there a thinking process that comes before language. Do I think of something and then translate those thoughts into language? W's conclusion is no.
That we only deal with finding relationships between the word signs that we have learned and match those relationships to the outside world.  The same thing goes on in colour. The more we know about differences between and within colours the more relationships we can invent. We can match those relationships to the outside world or we  just deal with our inventions separate from the outside world.

If I may digress for a moment and go to drawing for an example. D laughed at the focus fellow artists were giving to drawing and painting from the life model. His theory was that form was conceptualized in the mind and if form was not mentally conceptualized first in the mind then you could not draw the figure standing in front of you. If you were capable of conceptualizing the form then you did not need the model because  it only interfered with the mind' s natural ability to discard extraneous detail (this is what the camera does not do)

The question now becomes is working from a photograph or from life a thinking or matching process. It is always difficult to work with absolutes so lets rephrase that so we have four dynamic elements.
1) the coloured photograph, 2) the object seen in life, 3) the mind.
4) the artist. The question now becomes how much colour thought  will the artist take from the photo, from life and from his mind.

We now enter the world of aesthetics. Who makes the judgement as to what is beautiful.

 _________________________________**********_______________________
 real old stuff I don't want to throw out yet

This is the third in a series of four sections that I am developing in unison. Even though they are at the  work in process stage I have been asked by fellow artists to present them as is. Every few days I work to one or more of them.
 

"Color theory  for the Intellectual Artist" is the  third of four sections built within the aesthetic framework described in the first section and further develops the concept of using , clarity within unity and clarity within varity to develop mood.

 I have always had eye problems;  they both blurred and distorted shapes . Maybe that's what caused me to pay closer attention to what I could see. Over the years I have had to develop ways of validating what I saw with my eyes saw because , I could not trust the shape proportions my vision was presenting me with, but  I discovered through colour perception testing that I had excellent colour differential perception. So, I started my artistic life with blurry vision; distorted shapes, and excellent colour vision.

One day while looking at a Windsor and Newton colour samples, ( which in the 50's were real pigment samples and free) I noticed that some colours looked as though they belonged together at some unifying level, but the other colours didn't look like they had this unifying aspect. That observation bewildered me.

Then on another occasion  the local newspaper had an article and a picture of the art gallery's  recent purchase of  a small painting by Chardin "Return from Market". I visited the original at the gallery and could see that all the colors though different in hue had some common quality that gave it unity. It is from this point that I began to think that maybe I am not seeing things.  It  would take another three decades of searching to validate my ideas.

My ideas got a boost  when upon a subsequent visit to the gallery I discovered one of Picasso's post cubist paintings. To my amaizment the colours had the same type of unity as the colors in the small Chardin painting.  The colors were analagus but the composition shapes were a   angular and curved. It was the unity of color that played a major role in holding the composition together and not the analagous colors. In addition  all the painting's colors were held to one plane. (insert period in history when Picasso would have studied color theory)

I began to explore original paintings of the old masters looking for this colour quality and found ample evidence that I was on the right track, but how did they get that unity?
 

It is to those serious intellectual artists who know deep down that visual art is as complex as philosophy; poetry; literature; music or architecture and that thoughtfull reflection rather than the self serving cliché  of the put-down artists is the long road which must be travelled, that I dedicate this work, and, It is to them I give the following quote:  When Titian was asked "how do you mix your colours", he replied,

The aesthetic objective of art is to orchestrate an invented  system of  clarity relationships each of which satisfies the conditions of clarity of varity within clarity of unity within the domains of: Music; Literature; Poetry; Theatre; Painting; Sculpture   Architecture; Physics; Astronomy; Mathmetics; etc.

You will note that I use the phrase "invented system of clarity relationships".  For example It has been observed and stated over the centures that our lightest painting element is white and our darkest is black, but nature has a greater range of light to dark than our simple pigments allow us. So we re-present the relationships between natures lights and darks into our limited light to dark range using a system of ratios much like the system of string lengths used to create a range of musical notes. So, in terms of light and dark we cannot copy nature's tones we must re-present  them into an approximating relational system. This is the origin of  the phrase "representional painting". (Aesthetics for the Intellectual Artist, describes this tonal scale).

The application of human intelligence in the form of pure thought is a fundimental criteria for the existance of fine art. The experienced viewer of art looks for signs that human intelligence is present in the work. The artist has no absolute control over the viewers interpretation of an art work. It is the viewer' s intelligence; age; life experience and cultural programming that determines his or her  view point. At this point I will say that Roger Fry's four stages of vision represent some of interesting thoughts on the matter.

The aesthetic objective of paintingt is to orchestrate an invented  a system of clarity (pure thought) relationships for each of the elements: Drawing: Color and Mood into a unified composition within which harmonic aspects of varity support the artists thematic intent. The Aesthetics of Painting is discussed in my essay "Aesthetics for the Intellectual Artist".
 

The individual colours in the painting will be perceived to move towards each other or apart or be indifferent to each other, but the overall effect will be a unified colour system. I am holding to the aesthetic concept of  unity at the overall level and variety within it and at the same time  I am trying to provide ideas on how to achieve it.

First we have to define in general what theory is and how it can help us.  Let me digress for a moment and provide a general example of theory and it's application. When I went to high school the programmes were divided into (1) academic, (2) commercial, (3) industrial. If  for example you studied commercial mathematics, you learned formulas and if  you forgot a formula you could do nothing.   If on the other hand you studied algebra you had  some tools that you could use to figure out the formula if you forgot it.  I know many people are going to say they never learned algebra that way.  Sorry but times have changed.
 

So,  my definition of colour theory then is a set of rules that allows us to describe and predict the general outcome of  visually perceived combinations of colours in which we have an enquiring interest. One  predicted general outcome is to ensure that colour conforms to the aesthetic rule of variety within unity and that the artistic work must maintain it's wholeness such that none  of its parts can be allowed to destroy that wholeness. Colour theory will act as the grammar of a colour language that will allow us to express ourselves in colour terms.

In our local Gallery there is a painting called "Voice of Fire", it is a large painting composed of three vertical stripes.  If you walk up close and look at it's colour, the red and blue are in perfect chromatic balance. The intensity of the red and the intensity of the blue behave like brother and sister from the same family. It satisfies the aesthetic condition of variety within unity. The colour is varied and the unity is in the perception of physical sameness.