The Element of Color

Part 1

After looking at the design principles of color I learned various things about color that I didn't know. First the slides talk about the essentials of color and how light is made up of all colors and its a property of light and how everything doesn't come with a light but more so the reflection is what makes the color, different colors absorb different colors like maybe you've heard people say "don't wear black when it hot outside" because the color black absorbs all colors including the color of the sun as for white, white reflects it. The slides later talk about different types of mixing when it comes to color mixing which I didn't know there were different names for the way you mix your colors but there's the additive system, the subtractive system and then they talk about the color wheel and the primary colors which consisted of red, blue and yellow. The primary colors can make up any color except for white or maybe even sometimes black, yeah you can get a really muddy color but making a really good black is really difficult. There are also color characteristics like light and color perception as well as color constancy and constancy effect. There are also three properties of color which include hue, value, and the complementary colors. Going int what hue is, hue ultimately is the name of the color but it's just categorized in different shades. Then there's the color wheel where they talk more about primary colors and secondary colors which are the colors that are made when you mix the primary colors and then the tertiary colors which is what you get from mixing the secondary colors together. We begin to see value and what it is, it's the lightness or darkness of a color and its used when you do shading and then there's tint which is when you add the color white to the value. Properties of color include intensity which is how bright a color is and then we have simultaneous contrast which is "when 2 compliments are placed next to each other, they increase in visual brilliance, usually with a vibrating edge." Afterimage effect happens to me quite often but its when you stare at something that's a specific color for a long period of time and then once you look away you can see the color everywhere even though you're no longer looking at it. The slides talk about pallets and color mixing and how there are many ways you can do that like post, and pointillism. Later we get into the cool and the warm colors so the cool colors are more so the blues, greens, violets, those type of colors and the warm colors are the reds, oranges, and yellows. A lot of the times some artists use minimum color in their pieces and then souley make one object a certain color while the rest of the piece is dull and in black and white and they do that to use it as an attention grabber or artists also place certain colors in certain areas so that the eye pas attention to one side of the piece more than the other in order to capture the story behind the piece. A lot of the times people like using color schemes and I learned that there are five different types, monochromatic, analogous, complementary, split compliment, and triadic. Lastly the slides talk about more of the fun vibrant colors and how they're used to add contract and really catch the eyes, they're used more freely today and the fashion world works with them a lot, depending on the color our eyes can only take so much in so that's something to keep in mind as an artist, there are certain colors that many people may associate with different things and feelings for example blue, blue is usually used when people are sad, people often even say "I'm feeling blue" as a way to express themselves. Overall I didn't know there was so much I could learn about colors, colors are one of the firsts things that we learn in our lives so its crazy to think that there's always something new to learn.

Part 2

I really enjoyed working on this color exercise, I actually think it was my favorite so far. I really enjoyed having more of that freedom of what I wanted to create, what colors I wanted to use, and which patterns I wanted to make. Overall it was really really fun and I didn't feel so stressed out like with the previous activities I've done and I also somewhat liked how it turned out.