Tuesday Tutorial: Drawing basics #3 "Colors"

Colors are surrounding us. We are very lucky abuot that. The human eye can distinguish about 16.8 millions of colors! Imagine the whole world in two or three colors.... we can only look at as colors as a gift!

Since a long time ago humans understood that colors are affecting us. They may give us tranqullity or energy, anxiety or tenderness, and many other emotions!

So as human we started to study and define the meaning of each color since many years ago. Doing this, we alway had a reference: the beautiful nature!

Are you cold or are you warm?

Colors may be distinguished in three main "families": COLD, WARM and NEUTRAL. As suggested by the name, cold colors are those who tent to the blue tones, warm colors are those who tent to the red tones. The others are black and white, which, if they are pure, are kind of neutral.

Anyway we can say that any color may be located on a main family, but it can contain traces of the opposite family! For example a sunset may have red but cold tones (with traces of blue), as a "blue purple" may be warmer than a "icy blue".

Let's see this in a more practical way:

Color meaning

As explained, every color tend to induce an emotion, so we can give every color a meaning. But caution, even if this is true in almost all cases and can be globally recognized, the meaning we associate to a particular color may even be strictly personal. Also the culture may produce a completely different association (for example in Japan, white is the color of death!). In the following table there's a quick description for the main colors:

Color description

As said, there's many variation of what we call "red", "blue", "black" and so on...

To describe the main color we are talking about, we use HUE. For example red, blue, yellow are hues.

To describe the intensity of the color, we talk about SATURATION, or chroma

To describe the quantity of white or black added to the color, we talk about LIGHTNESS.

As usual we let images talk for us. This is a rappresentation of the Munsell color system.

Source: Wikipedia

In the end, we can see how all this is used by our friend, at Disney (yeah you know, uncle Walt.... ;D )

Soon, we'll se even which combinations of colors we can use, to express a concept or an emotion! Stay tuned!

Here we are! Let's build a character and give him some colors! Remember that one of the pillars in drawing is: PRACTICE! Don't be afraid to try your character and post it with #airdrawingjourney

For every question or suggestion you can leave a comment or contact me via chat.

Remember, all the images (except for Disney character's) are made by me and any reproduction is forbidden without permission.

Thanks for watching!

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llustrator, graphic designer

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Folk and Blues enthusiast 

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