"Paintings With Personality"

I saw this young woman at a "Free For All". I took a lot of pictures that day and painted a few of them later, in my studio.

Intensity, hue and value are all attributes of color and, as a result, they often overlap in the way they are used. Color Intensity, sometimes called Chroma or saturation refers to the brightness, lightness or dullness of a color. A Pure Hue is the highest intensity where no black or white has been added. Value is the lightness or darkness of a color, and intensity is the brightness or dullness of a color. Shades are a pure hue that has been darkened. Tints are pure hues that have been lightened. Tones are the gradation of value, going from black to white. It is important to know the intensity of a color because each hue has a relative value. For example, a pure yellow hue at full intensity is light in value, and a pure blue hue at full intensity can be a medium value or darker.

Paint straight from a tube is usually very intense and has to be mixed with another color in order to look natural. The hues become more neutral as they get closer to their complements. When hues are totally neutralized the color and intensity disappear, but they still have value. In watercolor, you can change the value of a hue by adding water. When you mix complementary colors the result is a neutral gray, but when you put complementary colors next to each other the intensity is visually increased. Have you ever heard someone say, "Put complements next to each other to make them pop."

Every color will lower the intensity of a hue except an equally intense hue. If we want to turn a red into an orange-red, we would naturally think, “add a little yellow,” what we should add is the reddest orange we have. Adding yellow would lower the intensity of both the red and the yellow. If we try to tone down warm colors using black, they turn cool, especially yellow, orange, or red. When we mix black with yellow or orange we get a green color, which is nice if we wanted that color. It’s actually a very good color for evergreen trees. When black is mixed with red it looks violet or purple. When we mix pigments, we should use a pure color, not a mixed color in order to get maximal concentration of intensity. There are times we will add white and not a complement or add a complement and not white. It all depends on what we need to create our art.

Knowing color and how to use it helps us in both observation and decision making. The key is to practice.

Let me know what you think. Please comment.