Colour Theory and Painting
Colour questions in this paper are practical: mix this, name that relationship, explain why a painting feels warm. You are expected to know the pigment colour wheel and the painter's vocabulary of hue, value and intensity.
The wheel and its relationships
- Primaries (pigment) red, yellow, blue. Secondaries orange, green, violet. Tertiaries are the six in-between mixes.
- Complementary - opposite on the wheel (red/green, blue/orange, yellow/violet). Mixed, they neutralise each other.
- Analogous - neighbours sharing a hue family.
- Warm colours advance; cool colours recede. Tint = plus white; shade = plus black; tone = plus grey.
Painting methods
Wash, wet-on-wet, wet-on-dry, dry brush, impasto (thick paint), glazing (thin transparent layers) and underpainting.
Worked example
"Make the green duller without using black." Reasoning: a colour is desaturated by adding its complement, not by adding black - black also darkens the value, so it changes two things at once. Add a touch of red to green; the two complements cancel chroma and you get an olive. Better still, put the red down first and add green into it, so you control the amount. Answer: add the complement in small amounts and stop when the intensity drops.
Traps
- Mixing three or more pigments and getting mud.
- Using black to shade yellow - use violet or a deeper ochre instead.
- Judging a mixed colour wet; it dries duller and lighter.
- Forgetting value: a poster reads badly even with correct hues if every colour is the same darkness.