Joseph Edwards was a big influence on my teaching,
but when I first started teaching color,
the first book I looked at was The Art of Color by Johannes Itten.
When we open The Art of Color,
one of the first things we see is Johannes Itten's color wheel.
And this particular color wheel is a wonderful invention.
It teaches us all about
the system of colors that we can see within the visible chromatic spectrum.
Itten has isolated certain colors.
So he has the primary colors in the center,
yellow,
blue and red.
The secondary colors adjacent to those primaries,
though yellow and red
mixes to be orange,
red and blue mixes to be purple,
and blue and yellow mixes to be green.
These are the secondary colors.
They point to themselves on the color wheel.
And then in between those primary,
red, yellow, blue, and secondary,
green, orange, and purple colors, are the tertiary, or in-between colors.
Yellow-green, yellow-orange,
red-orange, red-violet,
blue-violet, blue-green.
Altogether, we have these 12 colors.
And of course, in a visible spectrum,
there's continuous, with no breaks.
But we can isolate them down to 12 distinct hues.
Each hue has many lights,
many darks, many tints, many shades,
many vivids, and many dulls.
An infinite number of different colors within each hue.
But this is a really good way to simplify our perception of color,
how we see color,
in terms of primary colors,
secondary colors, and then all 12 colors of the visible chromatic spectrum.
Johannes Itten was one of the original teachers at the Bauhaus.
And in fact, he created the foundation course that all students at the Bauhaus took.
Joseph Albers was actually one of his students,
and later taught the same course,
after Itten was no longer at the Bauhaus.
What Itten tried to do,
in his teachings of the fundamentals,
was to create a system of contrast
that would allow students and teachers
to have a universal language,
a shared universal language,
for talking about the art and design
that they were looking at and working on.
One very important part of that universal language,
in terms of color,
that Itten created,
or devised,
was the seven color contrast.
His way of describing what goes on when we look at color.
It allowed him to talk about color in very specific terms,
and allowed students to understand color
in a very systematic way.
So the first of the seven color contrasts
is contrast of hue.
Think back to that color wheel.
There are 12 different hues.
So if we're just talking about contrast of hue,
we're really talking about the contrast of all colors.
But you can break that down into the contrast
of the primary colors,
contrast of the secondary colors,
or the contrast of all colors together.
And here we see a pretty good example of that.
We have the primaries, red, yellow, blue.
We have green, which is the secondary color.
And then we have the blacks and the whites.
So kind of reduce,
oh, we have one more color here,
sort of a desaturated red-violet.
But it's a good demonstration of contrast of hue.
Itten also used grids,
color grids, like this, to describe these color contrasts.
And his students would perform experiments with color using color grids.
The great thing about a color grid is that it takes away the burden of representation.
You're no longer consumed with making a landscape or making a portrait or a vase of flowers.
You're just thinking about the interaction of colors,
how one color relates to another,
usually with these edges that exist in between the colors.
Itten would always take his students on field trips.
Now, you can imagine, this is Germany,
early 20th century.
There were a lot of places to look at art.
You could go to a church and look at real art.
They didn't have slides.
They didn't have digital technology to show this stuff with.
So he would actually take his students and look at this stuff in person.
And here we see an example.
This is 11th century.
Primary colors, red, yellow, and blue.
So Itten would look at this,
and he would say,
look how the primary colors are exemplified
in this piece.
How this artist was able to isolate just those three colors with a little bit of green,
a little bit of brown,
but mostly the primaries, red, yellow, blue.
Another painting, obviously, a religious theme painting,
15th century.
Heavy emphasis on reds and oranges,
some desaturated colors down here.
1410,
Paul D.
Limburg.
The blue,
some yellows, some reds,
greens at the bottom,
blues at the top.
And then his last example, of course, Mondrian,
who was a contemporary.
This painting was done in 1928,
long after Itten was gone from the Bauhaus.
Mondrian,
painting, of course, very popular at that time amongst avant-gardists.
Very simple compared to others,
but still using those same ideas.
Primary colors, red, yellow, blue,
in this case, mixed with black, white, and gray.
I always like to think that one can learn everything they need to know about basic color and composition
from looking at Mondrian.
The second color contrast,
contrast of light and dark,
or we say value,
value meaning light value, light and dark.
But we start with contrast of hue,
now we have contrast of light and dark.
This is really talking about the possibilities
for any color to have tints or shades.
But first we start with black and white.
And Itten shows us many different examples of works simply in black and white,
in which value, or light and dark,
is an essential factor in how we see the work.
Beautiful Seurat.
So much about light and dark.
And then from there,
he says, well,
every hue has light and dark variants.
The interesting thing about this chart is,
again, one of the most effective ways of looking at color
is to see its relationship to other colors.
But note that when we look at each of these columns,
each column is a hue.
We have purple,
blue-violet, blue,
blue-green, green,
yellow-green, yellow, yellow-orange, orange, red-orange, red, and red-violet, and then gray on this side.
We can also note that what we consider
to be the purest of the colors,
the colors that we identify
most with the identity of the color,
actually lies in different parts of those columns.
So when we think of purple,
we're thinking of a color that is down here,
not up here.
This might be a lavender,
but it's not purple or violet.
When we think of blue-violet or navy,
we're really thinking about a color in this range.
Blue here,
blue-green here, green here, yellow-green, maybe here or here,
yellow here.
So we go from purple,
which is really low on the value scale,
very close to black,
very far away from white,
yellow,
which is the lightest color on the value scale,
very close to white,
very far away from black.
And then we proceed down, orange here,
red-orange, red.
Red and green are sort of in the middle of value scale.
And then red-violet, again,
marching down a little bit toward the area where purple and blue is.
So right away you can start
to say, oh, okay, so if I want to use a color that has many tints,
going to be purple or blue, maybe blue-violet,
maybe green,
maybe red.
If I want a color that has many shades,
many darker variants, it's going to be a lighter color,
like yellow or orange.
Yellow has many shades,
but very few tints.
Purple has many tints,
but very few shades.
As we look further,
we can see examples, again, historical examples,
1598, where contrast of value,
contrast of light and dark,
is an essential part of the work.
This painting is all about that idea.
Intense light shining on these objects on a table
with a very, very dark background.
Some of you may know the term chiaroscuro,
that idea of intense light and dark.
This is a great example of that.
So is Rembrandt,
Rembrandt's work, 1606.
Another great example of chiaroscuro.
So all of our focus is up here on this lightest area.
And then we go from there,
the helmet, down to the face,
a little bit of shininess down here,
and then the rest of the composition,
the rest of the painting is very dark.
So we see how value,
contrast of light and dark,
creates visual hierarchy.
Such an important part of design,
right?
Thinking about design fundamentals,
directing the viewer's eye to a particular part of the composition.
Rembrandt here was trying to describe something about this helmet as being important.
And that's what we look at first.
Of course, we're going to look at the face,
but we're going to look at this helmet first,
because it's the lightest.
Picasso,
great collage.
It's a painting, but it looks like a collage,
perhaps based on a collage.
And we see here,
again, how color can produce the idea of light and dark,
contrast of value, just with color.
So we have, obviously, the lighter areas, the white here and here,
but we also have a light green.
So like we saw on that chart,
a color can be light or dark,
just like this green is light compared to the blue, which is dark.
So chroma can be light or dark,
but also pure black and pure white,
and the grays that exist in between,
which include these browns.
Brown is kind of like a gray.
So Picasso is using contrast of value,
contrast of light and dark,
to control how our eyes move through this composition.
We see the light areas first,
because they stand out the most.
Third contrast, we see the light areas.
Third contrast, contrast of temperature, warm and cool,
how colors can actually create the sensation of temperature change,
warm and cool, simply by looking at colors.
This has a lot to do with our experiences in life, right?
Associations.
We associate coolness with water and warmth with fire.
So of course, orange is going to seem warm and blue is going to seem cool.
But there's also just that idea that they're extreme contrasts.
Blue and orange are complementary.
They're on different sides of the color wheel.
They're as far away from each other as you could possibly get in terms of hue.
And they also have that added idea that we associate them with warm and cool sensation.
As we see down here,
one hue or adjacent hues, analogous hues,
can also seem warm and cool.
So a red can be warm,
like red-orange, or cool, like red-violet or pink.
A green can be warm,
like yellow-green, or cool, like blue-green.
And again, a grid showing the composition of warm and cool colors interacting together, a painting,
and stained glass windows,
where blue and red are used in extreme contrast.
Not so much to suggest warm and cool,
but just in terms of severe,
intense contrast to set off one another.
And this detail,
Renoir.
So here in this case,
the face is warm and the surrounding areas are cool.
So he's using color temperature to create contrast within the composition.
Also to create a sensation of warmth,
skin tone,
a body, a human.
And then the background is cool, the environment.
Finally, warm and cool with Cezanne,
this great still life with fruit.
The fruit itself is orange,
the ground around it,
different mutations of blue,
green.
Another contrast, complementary contrast.
Colors that are truly opposite each other,
that when mixed together,
produce a neutral gray,
as we see down here.
So yellow and purple,
opposites on the color wheel.
Blue and orange, opposites on the color wheel.
Red and green, again, opposites on the color wheel.
And when we mix them together,
and this is something we're going to experiment with on the computer,
when we mix these
colors together, we produce a neutral gray in the middle.
That's kind of the
proof of complementary color.
It would say that these two colors,
they attract each other,
and they also incite each other to maximum potential.
They also repel each other at certain
times, like red and green.
Here's complementary colors, red and green, used in this painting.
Della Francesca, 1410.
Cezanne again,
orange and blue.
Simultaneous contrast, another contrast.
We're going to talk in depth about this when we go back and talk
about Elbers later in the course.
But right now, we can just think about this.
And thinking back to Elbers and relativity of color,
simultaneous contrast is basically that.
The fact that the same color can look different on different grounds.
Iden shows us the example here
of how the same gray will shift slightly based on its ground.
And he shows us these blue figures existing on different backgrounds,
and we see different levels of contrast based on that.
Van Gogh, of course,
the complements of yellow-orange and blue-violet.
Extreme contrasts of warm and cool,
extreme contrasts of light and dark,
and of complementary contrast.
Contrasts of saturation,
vivid and dull.
So in the centers of these grids,
we see the most pure,
the most saturated forms of these colors.
And as we move to the outside,
we see them mixed with gray.
So some students will say,
what's the difference between contrast of value and contrast of saturation?
Aren't they kind of the same?
Well, they are sort of the same.
There's a lot of overlap between these contrasts.
But a way to distinguish saturation is to think of a mixture with gray or a mixture with this complement.
Whereas when you're thinking about value,
you're really thinking about mixtures
with pure black and pure white.
Over here, we see this small grid,
intense saturation change from the background,
which is very dull,
very desaturated, to the foreground colors,
the blue, the green, and the purple being very,
very visible, very identifiable.
That's how I like to think about saturation,
the identity of color.
If it's easily identifiable,
it's highly saturated.
If you have a hard time naming it,
it's gray or brown, desaturated.
Here we see intense saturation of this orange.
The saturation goes down as it gets darker.
Matisse, one of my favorite paintings,
great example of saturation change, from these greens,
the orange, and the blue,
to the grays of the background.
They're using contrast of saturation to,
again, create a very beautiful,
very structured composition.
Paul Klee,
intense contrast of saturation,
intense, vivid, and dulls.
Contrast of extension.
This is the hardest one to really understand.
It took me the longest to really understand it,
and I actually didn't teach it for a long time.
Now I have a better sense of this.
This contrast is based on the idea that a color can have a value
relative to black or white or light or dark.
Now, we already talked about that in terms of value change.
But this has to do with amounts and proportions used in the same composition
to either produce a sensation of harmony or discord.
Itten says,
and this actually goes back to something he was,
became aware of by studying the work of a color theorist that preceded him,
Goethe, the great German philosopher, poet,
color theorist, that colors have a mathematical proportion to each other.
And when used in specific ratios,
specific proportions, will produce either harmonic effects or discordant effects.
So right up here,
we see how yellow and purple have a certain relationship
based on their light value.
And over here in the color wheel,
we see a similar thing.
Orange and blue, red and green, each one of them,
each set has a different relationship.
And what Itten is saying,
and what Goethe said before him,
is that one part yellow and three parts purple
will create a sense of harmony.
That one part orange and two parts blue
will create a sense of harmony.
And that red and green,
when used in equal amounts,
will again, produce a harmonic relationship based on their light values.
So you can actually try this in your compositions.
Try using colors in those proportions.
Maybe start with yellow and purple.
And you'll find that if you put too much yellow into a composition,
it immediately takes over.
And you'll see how these proportions actually start to make sense.
This color wheel is a great example of that.
See how yellow has the least amount of extension,
the least amount of proportion.
Purple has the most.
In order to create a sensation where all colors are balanced,
there needs to be more purple,
a little bit less blue.
Red and green are about the same.
Orange is less.
And yellow is the least. Orange is less.
And yellow is the least.
And we can see here how that effect is used
to create intense visual hierarchy.
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