Your questions indicate that you are impatient to learn more about color - and that is an excellent sign that you are understanding the subject more and more.

When you learn about color what you are doing is just about what you did when you learned how to cook. You learned that certain combinations of ingredients produced certain results. Once you got the idea that if you mix together flour, milk or water, baking powder or yeast and some other things that the result was bread, it wasn't a really big step to changing the kind of flour to produce wheat bread, or the kind of milk to produce buttermilk biscuits. The same thing applies to color. Once you get the general idea of what is involved, it's not a big step to controlling it in your own work. And eventually, you'll even be able to be as confident with color in your work as you are with food in your kitchen. But you wouldn't have dreamed, when you were learning to cook, of not at least reading the recipe and discovering what ingredients to use. And it did help to know that sugar was sweet, and salt wasn't, because it did make a difference in the outcome. When I was learning to cook, my most favorite recipe book was the one that started off with "First you open the can." So let's begin studying color at that point, and take it one step at a time.

There are many fields that can include the study of color. Among them are:

• physics (studying the effects of light),
• human anatomy (the study of the human eye),
• psychology (the effects of various colors on the human mind or what the like or dislike of these colors "mean" in personality traits -- which can be rather akin to feeling the bumps on the head),
• advertising (how to induce the public to buy a product by making it appear as attractive as possible through the use of color), and
• even symbolic language - (yellow means royalty in some cultures while violet represents it in others).

While it might be interesting to know that there are 60 radiant energy octaves, only one of which may be seen, or that the human eye contains rods and cones that allow us to distinguish value and hue, or that the color blue tastes sweet, none of these things tell us anything at all about that portion of the subject of color that would allow us to control it in our work. Somehow, it has become fashionable to mix the information of the various sciences in with the study of what we really need to learn, and the result can be a confusing "Mulligan Stew" that the novice might grow frustrated about because she can't see the application. To the novice struggling with the beginning concepts of color it's the kind of thing that promotes that mystique that I told you about.

What we need to learn about is "pigment." Pigment is what colors the world around us. It's in the green of the leaves and the yellow of the daffodils. While it is the interaction of light upon pigment that allows us to see the green or the yellow, it is the pigment itself that we work with, and can learn to control

Long ago, Man - becoming dissatisfied (which seems to be his nature) with just the natural colors of the materials he was using, and wanting to emulate nature more closely - figured out how to apply pigment (dye, paint, glaze, etc.) to make these materials a different color. Our ancestors were very. adept at this, and from the earliest times, Man began to color the articles that he made for his world. He colored his pottery, the walls of his home and his temples, and his clothing. In some cultures he even colored his own body. So, Man's fascination with color has been around since the beginning - and it's not surprising that we find ourselves fascinated with color, too.

Let's discuss some of the other characteristics of color, so you will begin to see how it all fits together a little more clearly. There are three (some say four) characteristics of color - value, hue and intensity. Some teachers or schools add the characteristic of temperature. We discussed value last time, and there is only a little that should be added to that information, so let's concentrate on the others this time.

The dictionary definition of the word "hue" states that it means "the attributes of colors that permit them to be classed as yellow, green, blue or an intermediate between any contiguous pair of these" (Webster's Third Unabridged Dictionary). So, the word "hue" refers to the name - the exact name - of the pure color. The "primary hues" are red, blue and yellow. They are called "primary" because they are irreducible into other colors and all other colors are made from those three. The "secondary" hues are orange, green and violet. Secondaries are made by mixing 50% of one primary with 50% of another. A 50/50 mix of red and yellow, for instance, produces orange.

Together, the primaries and the secondaries are the basis for the "color wheel." A color wheel is a common organization of the various pure hues of the spectrum -- and also includes the "tertiary" colors. There is some disagreement about the term "tertiary." One book will tell you that the ternaries are primary/secondary mixtures like red/orange, blue/green/blue etc. (which is the way that I learned it). Another will say that these colors are called "intermediate hues" and call the ternaries the complement mix colors like "olive" green or "rust" (and I'll get to more about the complement mixes in a minute). It all depends on which school you attended as to which term was learned, and as long as you know that both terms can apply to the same thing, you won't become confused by it.

Color wheels are mathematically organized mixing charts. That is, they depend on the mixtures of the primaries by percentages. A 50/50 mix of red and yellow produces orange. A mixture of 2/3 red to 1/3 yellow produces red/orange. A mix of 3/4 red to 1/4 yellow produces red/orange/red - and so on. It's all done by the numbers. You can tell how much red is contained in any of the mixes by simply looking at the name of the color on the color wheel As you can see, it is an excellent idea to have a good color wheel as part of your equipment.

You will also be able to tell the exact complement by using the color wheel. "Complements" are hues that lie directly across from each other on the color wheel. They are as different from each other as two colors can get, and can, therefore, show each other off to the greatest advantage. Orange will appear as a truer, clearer orange when placed on a blue background. This is because blue contains no part of the hues that make orange (red and yellow). If one wishes to take full advantage of this phenomenon, exact complements must be used together. Blue/green for instance, is not the complement to red/orange/red. The exact complement would be green/blue/green - you need that extra part of green to make the color show to its fullest advantage.

Webmaster's Note: The image at the beginning of this page is a 24 color wheel showing the actual colors. The original article used a black and white illustration with the color names.

There is another important characteristic of color that you should know about - "intensity" (also called "chroma"). The word intensity refers to the amount of pure hue contained in any given color. I have heard it said that intensity means the "brightness or dullness" of a hue - but this is inaccurate. If you look at the pure hues on a color wheel you will find color at its most intense, but you will not always find color at its "brightest." Very often the addition of a little white will produce a brighter color - but it will not be as intense a color as it was originally. Why? Because any time white, black or the complement color is added to a hue, the intensity of that hue will be diminished - to the exact degree of the amount of the neutral or complement that was added. Yarn colors, by the way, are excellent examples of intensity in practice. You see, there is no such thing as white "dye." There are bleaching agents that will whiten the fibers - but that's not the same thing as dye. The gradations of value in yarn are produced by adding less dye - not by adding white to the dye colors. Therefore, the definition that I gave you before for intensity - the amount of pure hue contained in any given color - is excellently represented with the pure hue yarn values and the darkest values of the yarn family always contain the most dye.

The intensity of a hue is not diminished, however, by adding two adjacent hues (red and orange) together to create a third - at least not theoretically. However, here, theory and practice don't always mesh. What happens is that when you mix two pigments together, "subtractive color mixing" is brought into play. When two pigment hues are mixed the result is always slightly darker - and duller - than either of the parent hues. It will happen when you, yourself, mix the two hues, but not when you buy the hues in yarn, for instance, from a manufacturer as manufacturers don't mix the hues they use pure pigment. But it's something you should be aware of, if you plan out your work on paper using poster paints or acrylics and mix your colors.

If you add two complements together -in equal proportion - you will get some form of brown. If you add yellow and violet, the result is the ochers. If you add red and green, you get the umbers. And if it's orange and blue, the product is the siennas. If you add them together in "unequal" proportion - 75/25 for instance, the result will still be close to a brown, but it will be more characteristic of the larger percentage color - 75 percent yellow to 25 percent violet will be a more of an old gold color, for instance. Rust, olive green, navy blue and such other colors as maple, tan, wheat, chocolate, oxblood, auburn, walnut, seal, and many other colors are the result of mixing two complements together in equal or unequal proportion. You are able to obtain these results because complement pairs contain all three primary colors - and the net result of mixing all three primaries in equal proportion (again theoretically) is black - or something very close to black.

Intensity can be most easily seen to be altered when mixing two complements. If only a small amount of black or white is added to a hue, a change does occur but it may not be a great change, visually. If a small amount of black is added, the color becomes less lively - deader. If a small amount of white is added, the color may even become brighter - such as with Paternayan's 840 series (the 840 is the most intense, but the 843 is the brighter). However, even a small amount of a complement will produce a noticeable change in the intensity of the altered hue. It will become a more muted color, softer than the pure hue, slightly grayer.

Which brings us to another term that I believe you should become more familiar with. What is a "grayed" color? There are as many definitions for grayed color as there are color systems. If you are a follower of a particular system, by all means stick to what you understand the term to mean. If you aren't, here's the one I learned - it may serve you. It means any hue that has had its intensity reduced by adding either black, white or the complement hue - or any combination of these. Which means black plus white, white plus complement, complement plus black and white, or whatever combination you care to think up added to a pure hue will produce a " grayed" color, not just "gray" (black and white mixed).

Then there is the subject of the "temperature" of color. Again, there is no uniformity in what precisely is meant by the term. Some schools consider the various combinations of yellow through red to violet/red/violet to belong on the "warm" side of the color wheel and from violet through blue to yellow/green/yellow to belong to the "cool" side. Others consider that the colors of violet and yellow/green are "temperate" colors and are neither warm nor cool. If you stop to consider it, you will find that each and every color has a "warm" and a "cool" side to it. "Lemon" yellow is cool, while "golden" yellow is warm - yet they are both pure forms of yellow. The same applies to red, blue and all the other colors. So long as the "temperature" of the given hue is taken into account when choosing colors for a particular design, that is all that is necessary.

Getting back to the subject of "value," I want to add to the information that I gave you last time. Not only does the term apply to the gradations within a hue spread but the hues themselves also have values. Yellow is the lightest valued hue, and violet is the darkest. As your way is worked around the color wheel through complement pairs, the values of the complement pairs tend to even out - become more or less equal to each other. This is something that may need to be taken into account when choosing colors for a color scheme - especially if very dark values of the hues are necessary within the design. But I won't get into color schemes today. We'll save that for next time. Digest this first and then we'll discuss the various color schemes and some of the ways they can be made to work for you.

Fondly,

GENE