When I first started painting, I fell into a color mixing trap that so many emerging artists find themselves in: all of my colors were too saturated, and my paintings felt fake.
It's an easy mistake to make. When I saw a sky, I thought "blue," so I'd mix a tinted blue, even though a more true representation would've been a light grey with a blue undertone.
When you're trying to identify which part of your color you need to adjust while mixing, it can be hard if you don't have the correct terminology. Without accurate identification, it's harder to troubleshoot.
In this blog, I'd like to introduce you to the three dimensions of color: hue, value, and chroma. Once you understand each term, you'll be able to accurately describe which dimension of color is being affected by your color mixing and how to adjust it to achieve greater accuracy.
The First Dimension of Color: Hue
The first dimension of color is hue. Whenever you use words like yellow, red, or blue… those are all hues. A hue is simply the name we give a color family, while the word color is more of an umbrella term that applies to all variations of hues. A hue is technically considered a pure color and covers all primary, secondary, and tertiary colors on the wheel. However, all colors that you see are variations of these hues.
Let's use the color pink as an example throughout this blog.
Pink itself is not a hue; it's a tint of the red family, and the dominant wavelength of color that you perceive while looking at pink is red. So to mix that pink, you might reach for a red (which is the hue) and then add white to it to get the correct value.
The Second Dimension of Color: Value
The second dimension of color is value, which is how light or dark a color is. You can mix lighter values by adding a color with an intrinsically lighter value (like yellow or white) and darken by adding a color that's intrinsically darker (like blue or burnt umber).
Let's revisit the pink. If you were to darken the red instead of lighten it, you'd get maroon, moving it down the value scale. But by adding titanium white to the red, you slide it upwards. A little white moves it up a value or two, while a lot of white raises the value but bleaches the color.
You can also add a color with an inherently lighter value to achieve a similar result without the bleaching.
I did this to lighten the values in my poppy painting, Dulce et Decorum Est. I needed to lighten the poppies being hit by direct sunlight, but adding white would've just turned them pink. So I used Winsor Lemon, the lightest yellow in my palette, and was able to lighten the red without losing my saturation.
The Third Dimension of Color: Chroma
The third dimension of color is chroma, which is where many artists stumble. Chroma is how saturated a color is, but most colors that we see in everyday life are not pure at all.
Going back to the pink: if there's just a little white, it's still pretty saturated and high in chroma. If we add a lot of white, that reduces the intensity and saturation of the red.
One way to adjust your chroma levels is to use tints, tones, and shades, which simultaneously shifts the values. Another way to reduce chroma is to add a complementary color. For example, I like to use purple to tone back my yellows and red to tone back my greens. This keeps the colors nice and rich but pulls back the saturation and moves the color into a neutral territory.
If your paintings are too vibrant, consider pulling back the chroma by mixing complementaries in or by using warm and cool grey tones mixed by combining ultramarine blue, burnt umber, and titanium white.
If you want to increase the chroma of your paintings, you can glaze over your first layer with a thin layer of transparent color straight out of the tube or mixed with another pure color. Colors that come straight from the tube are often transparent, but if you work in layers, you can achieve greater vibrancy with each layer applied.
Leave a comment