Colour Theory and Application
What this domain tests
Colour vocabulary, mixing logic, scheme construction, and the ability to specify colour correctly for print or screen.
Core rules
- Three attributes: hue (name), value (light or dark; tint and shade), saturation or chroma (intensity; adding grey produces a tone).
- Primaries: red, yellow, blue for traditional pigment; light mixes additively as RGB; process print uses CMYK - cyan, magenta, yellow, key or black.
- Secondaries: orange, green, violet. Tertiaries: the six in-between hues.
- Schemes: monochromatic, analogous, complementary, split-complementary, triadic, tetradic.
- Warm colours advance; cool colours recede. Place warm against cool to separate figure from ground.
- Simultaneous contrast: a grey looks darker on white and lighter on black, and a hue shifts towards the complement of its neighbour.
- Itten's seven contrasts: hue, light–dark, cold–warm, complementary, simultaneous, saturation, extension of area.
Worked example
Brief: a calm, premium packaging panel. Take deep blue-green as base, a tint of it for the large field, and the near-complement, warm ochre, restricted to a small logo area. Reasoning: the low-chroma analogous field stays calm; the small complementary accent gives emphasis through contrast of extension without adding more hues.
Odisha palette note
Pattachitra uses mineral and vegetable colour - hingula for vermilion red, haritala for yellow, sankha for conch white, lamp-black, and green from leaves - laid flat inside firm outlines.
Traps
- Calling black a hue; it is a value.
- Mixing all three primaries and expecting a clean secondary; over-mixing muddies.
- Judging an RGB screen against a CMYK proof; they will never match exactly.
- Giving four hues equal area, which leaves no hierarchy.