A 3-minute Color Theory Lesson

Colors in art are always relative: if we isolate a color from the rest, it will look slightly different from how we perceive it in the original artwork. And if we put it in the context of the other colors, it changes depending on which color we choose to pair it with. Take a look at this background painting example from the animated short Ignited:

The green of the earth you’re seeing only seems green: if you look at the color wheel, you will quickly find out that this is actually a shade of blue!

To conduct an experiment, we can pair it up with other colors from the painting and compare the results. You will notice how different it looks in every combination:

With the blue, watery color, the green looks greener; while paired with purple, it looks more grey. Even the bit of land on the right side that looks like warm green in the painting is actually a blue-ish grey! The overall color palette of this painting is primarily shades of blue, with a few exceptions.

In practice, you can skip entire sections of the color wheel when creating art, and viewers won't even notice their absence. A 19th-century Swedish painter named Anders Zorn was famous for executing pieces with a limited color palette:

His favorite palette contained no blue at all, but the contrast he created between his warm and desaturated colors was enough to suggest cool colors without actually using any, relying instead on saturation contrast.

"The more of your saturation range you leave in reserve, the greater the amount of local saturation contrast you can generate with it."

 

A simple exercise to try out:

To put this to the test, grab a screenshot of a painting, a video game, or an animated movie that you like. Spot the color you think you recognize, and color-pick it. Were you right in your first assumption that the green was, in fact, green, or did it turn out to be something else? Share your explorations with us!

In VFX-A All Access, we explore the intricacies of color theory in greater depth, and our mentors carry out the incredible work of teaching these fundamentals comprehensively!