This cube is not filled with water, or sand, or even concrete, but colors! Colors are pretty abstract, and we typically talk about cubes and other 3D objects that represent abstract ideas as spaces, hence we call this cube a color space. Showing the colors in a bunch of tables just feels wrong, though, doesn’t it? That’s because, while our tables are 2D, as we are mixing three primary colors, color can be thought of as 3D! It’s a bit odd the first time you think about it this way, but you can actually stack these tables based on the amount of blue and they become a cube! In fact, if we had made 6 samples instead of 5 per “channel” (that is, per each primary color), we’d have gotten the 216 websafe colors! This way of ordering colors is probably familiar to you if you have used some programs for making internet applications, like Flash. Our screens can certainly create a lot of shades of red, but we only start to see the power of pixels when we add in the other primary colors, green and blue, and show the colors of light that are produced when they are added together! For example, here’s a table showing various mixes of red and green:īut that’s just red and green, what about blue? I guess we can make even more tables to show what happens when different amounts of blue are added into the mix: Shown above is a table of different intensities of red light. As such, we can make a list of possible primary color intensities: Unlike mixing paint, where light intensity is subtracted by pigment and mixing all the colors together produces a muddy brown or gray, mixing lights is additive - no light at all is obviously black, and mixing all of the colored lights produces white. In the digital world of computers color is treated similarly, and we order colors by the way the screen generates them each pixel of color on our screen is produced by combining super tiny red, green, and blue lights of varying intensities. Mixing between those colors creates tertiary colors, and so on - the variations of hues between each named color are practically limitless! Thinking of colors in this way creates a circle of hues that artists call “the color wheel”! Each one of these hues can be made lighter (tint) or darker (shade) by mixing with white or black, respectively, and any color can be made less saturated (more gray or muted) by mixing with another color on the opposite side of the color wheel. Mixing each primary color with each other reveals three secondary colors: violet, orange, and green. In the case of traditional media, we order the colors ( hues) by how they result from mixes of other colors, starting with the subtractive primary colors: cyan, magenta, yellow. Of course, nature itself is tied to physics, and the order of hues and the concept of brightness has everything to do with the wavelength and energy of light as it bounces around and eventually enters our eyes. For example, we tend to order hues in the order that they appear in a rainbow, and we think about brightness of values as a tonal range from white to black. Naturally, the first thing we do is organize the colors, usually based on what we see in nature. All of this becomes even more important the more colors we have access to! We also want to be able to quickly find our favorite shades of red or favorite tints of blue without thinking or working too hard. When painting, we want to be able to access and manipulate colors easily to do fun stuff like mixing them together or matching them to create visual harmony or contrast. Colors are pretty, and they’re also pretty fundamental to painting.
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