Exploring Colour

PART 1

I am passionate about all things COLOUR! I love to look at colour and to use colour in my artwork. During February 2025 I explored colour and below I share some of the things that I discovered. Read on to find out about how we see colour and the difference between light and pigment. Learn about primary colours and how they can be mixed to make other colours. Explore the properties of colour. And find out how you can use the camera on your phone to extract colour palettes from the world around you.

a colour wheel is a good place to start...

I keep a colour wheel in my studio; it helps me to think about the relationship between different colours on the wheel. This colour wheel shows the PRIMARY COLOURS of RED, YELLOW and BLUE along with the secondary and tertiary colours that are produced by mixing pigments of these colours.

COMPLEMENTARY colours can be found opposite one another on the wheel (for example blue/orange or yellow/purple).

WARM colours include red, yellow and orange, while green, blue and violet are usually seen as COOL colours.

A colour wheel such as this can help us to make decisions about what colours we want to include in our composition.

colour mixing

This colour wheel from The Color Wheel Company has lots of useful information about colour mixing. On the reverse, it demonstrates how each colour is changed by adding black, white and grey to the primary, secondary and tertiary colours.

Tints, shades and tones

A tint is where an artist adds a colour to white to create a lighter version of the colour. An example of a tint is pink. Pink is a tint created by adding white to red.
A shade is where an artist adds black to a colour to darken it down.
A tone is where an artist adds grey to a colour.

going deeper... additive & subtractive colour

We first engage with colour when we are very young - and our understanding of colour is based on the way that objects look. A green leaf, a red pen, a yellow banana. Colour appears to be a property of the many things that make up our world.

But it is more accurate to say that colour is produced by light - and the definition of colour on the Pantone website is

"Color is defined as the aspect of things that is caused by differing qualities

of light being reflected or emitted by them."

So we see the red pen as red because of the light that is hitting it and the extent to which that light is being reflected or absorbed. The human eye contains three types of cone cells, sensitive to short (blue), medium (green), and long (red) wavelengths of light, allowing us to perceive a wide range of colours.

Some people are diagnosed as 'colour blind'. There are different types of colour blindness and in extremely rare cases people are unable to see any colour at all, but most colour blind people are unable to fully ‘see’ red, green or blue light (for more information visit www.colourblindawareness.org. More recently, research has suggested that some people can see more colours than most people. ‘Tetra-chromats’ have a fourth type of cone, which is most sensitive in the yellow-green region of the visible spectrum. While people with three of these receptors have the ability to distinguish around one million different colours, tetrachromats are thought to see an estimated 100 million (see www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/tetrachromacy for more information.

(Somewhat confusingly) Colour produced by LIGHT is called ADDITIVE COLOUR - and white is the sum of all light in the visible spectrum. The primary triad for additive colour is red, blue and green. The more colour is added, the greater the luminosity. Additive colour is what we see on our computer screens (and is why we can choose a RGB space to use when we work digitally).

SUBTRACTIVE COLOUR is created by mixing PIGMENTS. This is the colour space that we use when we want to print something and the primary triad is cyan, magenta and yellow (the colours of the ink, along with black, in your printer). In the colour wheels above, the primary triad is blue, red and yellow. However, some argue that cyan, magenta and yellow are are more appropriate set of colours to mix with (red can be mixed from yellow and magenta, so is not strictly a primary colour). Ultimately, artists have a choice about what colours of paint they choose as the starting point for their colour mixing.

the properties of colour

All colours possess 3 distinct attributes:

HUE - the 'colour' (for example red)
SATURATION - the relative purity of a colour (pure colour vs. muted/desaturated colour)
VALUE - the relative lightness of darkness of a colour (determined by the amount of light it reflects). A Grey Scale Tool is useful for looking at the value of a colour. You can remove all the 'colour' from a composition by desaturating it using a mobile phone or computer. Then it is possible to see what values the composition contains by comparing the photograph to the greyscale tool. Value is one of the most important factors in determining the success of a composition.

creating colour palettes

As an abstract artist, I mostly choose my colour palettes instinctively (although my knowledge of colour theory probably does play an unconscious role in my decisions).

But I also collect colour inspiration from the world around me. I do this by taking photographs on my mobile phone and creating colour palettes using digital tools.

There are 3 apps that I have used to extract colour palettes from my photographs.

Here you can see a photograph of a flowering quince along with the 5 colours that I extracted from the image.

Information about the identity of colours can be expressed in a number of different ways, depending on how the colours are going to be used.

RGB values are used in digital creation (e.g. websites). Each parameter (red, green, and blue) defines the intensity of the colour with a value between 0 and 255. This means that there are 256 x 256 x 256 = 16777216 possible colours. For example, rgb(255, 0, 0) is displayed as red, because red is set to its highest value (255), and the other two (green and blue) are set to 0.

CMYK Values are the proportions of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black used in the production of a printed image.

HEX values - in HTML, a colour can be specified using a hexadecimal value in the form: #rrggbb, where rr (red), gg (green) and bb (blue) are hexadecimal values between 00 and ff (same as decimal 0-255). For example, #ff0000 is displayed as red, because red is set to its highest value (ff), and the other two (green and blue) are set to 00.

You can also use resources such as the Pantone system of categorising colours. Pantone gives each colour a names and identifies a 'colour of the year' each year. The colour for 2025 is called 'Mocha Mousse'.

and there is so much more...!

There is so much more that could be said about colour and how it can be used to create interesting compositions - not just in art, but in interior design, garden design and fashion. Part 1 of EXPLORING COLOUR has provided you with some of the key concepts that I find useful when I make decisions about how I use colour.

Part 2 of EXPLORING COLOUR will be added to my Subscribers Page later this year. In Part 2 I will be sharing more information about colour mixing (and tools that can help with the mixing process), using colour in composition, and the psychology of colour.

If you are interested in coming along to one of my WORKSHOPS on colour at the RWA in Bristol, click here to email me and I will let you know as soon as I have dates for the next workshop.