My foundation as a commercial artist in advertising, and being an art director prepared me for painting fine art by familiarizing me with color formula and how to render form through process. Seeing color was easy for me, reproducing it, playing with it became easy too. I owe it to learning 4 color process, doing manual color separations, and 4 color camera separations and color correcting them manually. Oil Painter and Colorist Kevin McPherson promotes a simple palette of primaries plus white to learn oil painting and to plein air paint. I am encouraging you to understand how light and shadow functions in printing the same as it does it in painting as a primer to painting form.
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| cyan (blue or C) Magenta (M) Yellow (Y) Black (K) |
We used the Andrew Loomas Color Wheel in Commercial Art because we used the 4 color printing process: cyan (blue), magenta, yellow, and black or CMYK.
This particular color wheel was superbly designed to show 10 values for each primary and secondary on the wheel, from white to black, with 4 tints and 4 tones. I have shared this Andrew Loomas color wheel with you because it explains tint and tone, halftones, the influence of black on a color. (Remember I most frequently use a mixture of burnt umber and ultramarine blue which makes a black, and I produce the same results as this wheel). It will help you learn to create dimensionality, and help you learn how to paint believable shadow.
Andrew Loomas shows us how an incremental addition of white moves us to white, and the color you get adding an incremental amount of black moves the color to complete representation of absence of light. If you added one more outer ring on this wheel it would be black in every position of the outer ring.
We reproduced almost all colors with these 4 inks. The pure ink color for each primary is found on either side of the line dividing tint from tone. The tint side is pure, the tone side has a percentage of black added making it a tone. Both tone and tints are called halftones. And halftones are created by lessening the degree of color saturation and by adding black to the mix to create form. We revealed form with these 4 colors in dots. dpi, or dots per square inch, which meant the highest concentration of any of the 4 colors would fill a square inch with solid color by printing that many dots to create maximum saturation.
The number and size of dots influenced the sharpness of the detail in that printed image. The less dots printed of the total dpi, the less intense the color since the unprinted dots equated to white when printed on a white sheet or page of paper. We also thought in tone, tint and halftone. Tint meant how close the dots were together in the absence of black. Tone meant how close the dots were printed together with the addition of black dots. In painting, currently, it is popular to drop the notion of tint and refer to all gradations as tone. But try to think of "tone" as an abbreviation for halftone instead. If you can train yourself to think in terms of tint halftones and tone halftones and memorize the order in which light meets shadow your ability to paint with take a big leap forward.
Tint halftones are the family of light. Tone halftones are the family of shadow. In printing 4 color process, the absence of ink dots represents white. In printing, the family of light's most intensity of color is called the local color, is the total dpi being printed to make a solid color and for our purposes of understanding how form is revealed, is position #3 in the light halftone family.
In 4 color process, the inks are transparent, so the colors change as the different inks are overprinted. It also matters which order the inks are printed. So yellow over blue produces a slightly different green than blue printed over yellow, and this is represented on this wheel. To mix oils by this chart you would just slightly increase one of the contributing 2 colors to acheive a similar result, since oil paint is opaque.
Position #3 represents to us the strongest intensity in the family of light. As the color dots space out the color de-intensifies. This is the family of light's halftone or family-of-light order position 2. In the spacing of the dots, the color mixes with the appearance of white or non-printed space of the dpi to form a tint. Now as the color intensity lessens in the #2 light-family halftone order position, the room between dots is increased. It is in this position #2 of the halftone family, that we start to show reflected light, by adding adjacent color to the halftone, as dots continue to decrease. To show form, not only does the intensity of color decrease as the form's surface changes, moving away from the light source, but colors from the surrounding objects should be added to the objects adjacent to one another, mating them, to reveal form by making light appear reflected on your surfaces. After doing this, we move to position #1 in the light family where, colors are neutralized and we are ready to add shadow. As color reduces and neutralizes, we reach the number one classification of order.
Tint halftone (light family) 3-2-1, is (1) Local Color of an objects' highest intensity of color meets (2) diluted local color and diluted reflected color meets (3) diluted colors neutralized,(opposite colors added).Tint halftone (light family) 321 now meets 123 shadow family or shadow halftone. Remember although I'm explaining 4-color offset printing, the absence of dots equals white, and the dilution of color, as it applies to mixing paint to paint form. In other words, at the point of highest intensity of light on a surface we start with pure local color, move away from light as the angle of light changes from 90 degree angle of light-to-surface, by adding white and reflected color. Then, the next step is to neutralize the faded intensity by adding opposite colors to the mix, and now we are ready to introduce shadow.
Shadow follows the 3-2-1 order of light with a 1-2-3 order of the shadow family where position #1 of light becomes neutralised color and changes to shadow family position #1 with the introduction of black. Next we have position #2 which is more reflected color in an increasing quantity of black, and position 3 is Black in it's most dense representation of the darkest dark of that particular shadow.
A word about black: I have been insistent that we mix our black. The reason is to create color continuity in our paintings by decreasing or increasing intensities of the colors used to create black, warming and cooling the black and controlling black's severity. The mix we use to make black is made up of colors in our palette and it harmonized with the other colors we have mixed by having the same constituent parts, appearing elsewhere in our painting. Black is so powerful, it is difficult to ration your usage as a novice painter. Lamp black or ivory black can quickly doom a novice's painting. So please don't close your mind to me or this color wheel based on me saying don't use black. We use black, only we mix it. So in your mind, substitute the black on this wheel with our mixed black. See the dividing line for the light family separating it from the shadow family. You can use this wheel to learn to tone and tint color, for reference until you teach yourself to warm up and cool off color, reflect color and neutralize color. Then there is pantone you can use for color formula too.
Pantone is a color chart system to identify the local color of an object. Each color on this chart gives a formula for the percentages of the 4 inks to make this color. I liked using this pantone system because I was already familiar with it, and it taught me to see separate color in a conglomerate color. To me pigment is pigment when mixing color. Of course how that pigment is suspended or bound influences an artist when reaching a color solution, but I hold that the formulas translate. More about the ease of pantone later. Once you learn to see and translate color and understand tint, tone, light family and shadow family, you won't need color wheels, or color formulas for reference, unless you are duplicating, copying, or forging and precision is paramount.
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