> Ask any artist to explain how color works, and they’ll launch into a treatise about how the Three Primary Colors—red, blue, and yellow—form a color wheel
I doubt that. More likely that they look at you akwardly or say a joke and try to carry on.
Some artist couldn’t care less about colours. A sculptor thinks much more about shapes, a 3d animator thinks much more about motion.
A writer or poet cares a lot more about what connotations different colour descriptors carry. “The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.” doesn’t quite hit the same as just calling it grey, for example.
Painters have a much more intimate connection with colour. But instead of thinking in primary colours they will be much more familiar with the mixing of the pigments they use. (Cadmium red, cobalt blue, burnt sienna, etc) A print artist or someone designing figurines or design objects would think in terms of pantone colours. Someone doing thread painting with embroidery floss will think about DMC colour codes.
And then of course there are colourist working on movie and TV productions who would know all the article describes and more. It is their job to know.
I don’t know why an otherwise quite okay article has to start with this image of the dum-dum arist “launching into a treatise” of kindergarden level colour understanding. It feels a bit degrading, as if the author has low opinion of artist. (And certainly not considering the full palette of the arts.)
I'd mention the book Blue and Yellow don't make Green, which taught me that my minimum set of paints should be:
* A purple-inclined red (crimson) and an orange-inclined red (scarlet)
* A green-inclined yellow (practically speaking, "spring green") and an orange-inclined yellow ("yellow")
* A purple-inclined blue (ultramarine) and a green-inclined blue (cerulean)
* White to make light tones (don't worry about black)
And these let me get almost all the spectral colors because, I think, the pigment grains don't interfere and don't cause subtractive mixing (there was some sketchy explanation about light bouncing between different pigment particles before bouncing properly back from the canvas). There are gaps due to the lack of any pure primary color, which we basically give up on being able to buy.
blueish red is a pain in the ass because there are not many pigments in that range that aren't "fugitive", meaning they fade in light. Alizarin fades fast. Last I checked a pigment called Quinacridone fits that spot on the wheel and doesn't fade.
Many children were incorrectly taught that Red, Yellow and Blue were "primary" colours from which you could make any other colour: wrong. Fotunately we have better teaching now.
In my experience, artists have a very fuzzy understanding of color, even those who use it wonderfully. At art school we were taught 'color theory', almost all of which was hand-wavey fluff.
> instead of thinking in primary colours [Painters] will be much more familiar with the mixing of the pigments they use. (Cadmium red, cobalt blue, burnt sienna, etc)
Absolutely agree. A red is never just the abstract red, it is a cadmium red, alizarin crimson, rose madder etc.
It happens I was re-reading my sister's book about fabric ("Poetic Cloth") yesterday, and yeah, no mention of this idea of "Primary Colors". When she explains her practice she's basically just eyeballing it. Match a cloth or a thread against your target visually, hold them up to the light, that sort off thing. Which makes a lot of sense.
yeah, anyone that paints will care the most about other things, like which colors they actually have available, and the quality of the pigments. If you take, say, most single pigment reds that aren't very toxic, you'll see that they have relatively low coverage: Lay it over a dark color, and you aren't really getting red, but filtering the darker color with some red on top. Pure pigments however kind of mix into reasonable colors that more or less resemble what a color wheel will tell you, but many paints are reached through mixes, and mixing mixes is often not getting you the colors the wheel would predict: Chances are you are getting something pretty brown, with very low intensity. You can make fun tricks for students, like showing them two pairs of almost indistinguishable blobs of paint, but that mix to something different, because two of the colors were pure pigments, and the others a carefully made mess.
And then there's not just color, but finishes, and the body of the paint.
So yes, once actually talking colors in a real piece, while the color wheel is a very useful tool for determining pleasant schemes, just like in a website, your real primary colors you think about are never a bright yellow, a bright red, and a bright blue.
> while the color wheel is a very useful tool for determining pleasant schemes
Is it? To my eyes, opposite colors on the painter's color wheel are maximally unpleasant. Green/red, for example, is infamous for creating bizarrely strobing optical illusions, when placed adjacent to each other. Purple/yellow. Blue/Orange. Also horrible combinations. I don't find color triads to be particularly pleasant combinations either.
I'm convinced that it's some made-up Victorian pomposity that nobody bothered to contradict, because anyone who was an actual artist didn't use it. Much like the Victorian theory that we taste salty and sweet on different parts of our tongue (we don't).
It is. The color wheel says complementary colors pop, but it doesn't imply this is a good thing. It's up to the designer to create something interesting from the contrast, typically by not putting them directly together.
A sibling comment mentions the blue-orange movie poster trope, and this is an excellent example. Note how the posters use the two colors: large blocky areas separated by either a smooth gradient or a high-density area of interest.
I doubt that. More likely that they look at you akwardly or say a joke and try to carry on.
Some artist couldn’t care less about colours. A sculptor thinks much more about shapes, a 3d animator thinks much more about motion.
A writer or poet cares a lot more about what connotations different colour descriptors carry. “The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.” doesn’t quite hit the same as just calling it grey, for example.
Painters have a much more intimate connection with colour. But instead of thinking in primary colours they will be much more familiar with the mixing of the pigments they use. (Cadmium red, cobalt blue, burnt sienna, etc) A print artist or someone designing figurines or design objects would think in terms of pantone colours. Someone doing thread painting with embroidery floss will think about DMC colour codes.
And then of course there are colourist working on movie and TV productions who would know all the article describes and more. It is their job to know.
I don’t know why an otherwise quite okay article has to start with this image of the dum-dum arist “launching into a treatise” of kindergarden level colour understanding. It feels a bit degrading, as if the author has low opinion of artist. (And certainly not considering the full palette of the arts.)