thedustyleaves:

About color: Everything you’ve been taught so far is (most likely) a lie.

Generally, what we know about color, is extremely “basic” knowledge, in the sense that classical art teachers don’t really know what they’re teaching. They’re just going by the book, rather than studying the book. 
I’ve had the honor of being taught by Lawrence Marvit, a teacher who studied everything he wanted to understand to the point where he could tear up old theories with no answer and explain them as simple and correct as possible. 

I was asked a while ago if I could give my opinion on a video about how to understand and study color, and if what they said in the video was correct, and I had to say no. I copied my answer for future use, and here’s what  I said, just corrected and with more detail: 

The things he taught in the video are not actually the most important – it’s just what people are made to believe are important. They are still very much valid, but they make color so much more complicated than it actually is, especially when it comes to putting different colors together in a picture. 

Some of these complications come for example from painting. You are told that you can go to an art-store and buy only blue, red and yellow, and then you will be able to mix all the other colors. You will then get surprised to see that you can’t mix a proper blue toned green – you have all the colors, so you’re supposed to be able to get a blue toned green, right?
It’s because we don’t just need the RGB colors, we need a Blue and a red tone of each color, for example a blue toned yellow and a red toned yellow 

If you mix a warm blue and a warm yellow together, you’re going to get a muddy sort of green, while if you mix the cold yellow and the cold blue, you’re going to get the blue toned green. As soon as we were taught this in class, so many of us went “IF ONLY I HAD KNOWN THIS JFC DLJFLSKDS” because many of us had tried painting, but stopped the moment we thought we couldn’t mix the RGB colors well enough and that we were stupid, when in actuality – we needed two tones of each color, and no one had told us this. 

It’s the same with color harmonies; as much as harmonies are good and all, harmonies are only used if you want your eyes to “feel at rest”. But if you look around in your everyday life, there are basically no color harmonies and yet your eyes are fine and usually also at rest.
It’s because everything is lit under the same light and therefore it ultimately also has the same shadow.
In color class, we were taught about local color and lighting our local colors and giving them a shadow, so no matter how many rainbow and lego colors we splashed on our drawings, everything would still fit together, purely because it’s all lit by the same light and has the same colored shadow. Even with multiple light sources, it still works like this 🙂 

An example could be this;

This is a picture with numerous characters, all of them wearing different costumes with different colors. If it hadn’t been for the red light showering them all, it would have been rainbow barf, and it’s the same thing below! They’re all under the same light and they all have the same shadow so they fit together in the picture. 

Local color is the base color aka how does something look under white light when it’s not affected by its surroundings. 

For example; A plant is green, but under red light, it looks almost brown and the shadow is blueish.
Btw, a super easy way to find out what the color your shadow would be; invert the color of your light. Like, if you have violet light, invert it and the shadow is going to be green 🙂 

of course you have to make it clear that one thing is the shadow and the other is the light, so desaturating one and lighting up the other is going to help so it’s not the same value. Kind of like this but probably more extreme!  

Something that is also important to remember: color is always, ALWAYS in relation to other colors. Even if you put your finger up in front of you, there is still all the colors around your finger which slightly changes how the skin color is perceived. If you take a yellow color and put one square on a white piece of paper and another square on a black piece of paper. On the black piece the yellow color will look like a much more saturated compared to one on the white piece. 

You can  play with any colors you want as long as they’re lit! Of course if you’re doing a picture with flat colors and no shading, then you have to be careful with the colors you choose so they don’t blend together(unless it’s what you want). That’s mostly a matter of taste though, and color wheels can’t teach you what’s right or wrong, but they teach you what works by the book 🙂