Introduction To Color

You went through your various media for me in lesson #1, so you should know what you have to work with, be it crayons, pastels, paints, markers, pencils, or what have you. In this intro to color, you'll need some plain white paper and something you have to draw with that comes in a lot of different colors, like a really big box of crayons or huge container of markers. It's your choice...just make sure you have an assortment of colors in whatever form of media you choose.

For exercise one, you'll also need a camera.

EXERCISE 1

Going anywhere you like, take a camera and shoot photos of things in single, pure colors. Take a picture of something entirely or predominantly red, like a flower, a strawberry, a Shelby Cobra, a woman's lips...try to fill the entire viewfinder with the item, getting as close up as you can without losing the idea of what the item is. It could even be a cluster of red ballons or roses, or a whole field of poppies... Then take a similar photo of something orange, then yellow, green, blue, purple, black, white, brown, grey. Take a photo of something metallic gold and something metallic silver. Once the film has been developed, take each photo and compare the colors to what you have in your collection of crayons, pencils, markers or whatever. Say you're using magic markers...match your photos to the closest marker. What we're trying to determine here is how close your idea of a pure color is to what you have at hand to draw with. If you used an apple for your red photo, you may find that a shade of red marker other than what you might consider pure red matches it better. If possible, match the varying shades of red as shadow and light play across the apple. Do this with each photo. I want you to be able to break down everyday objects into varying shades of color just by looking at them and see how colors are altered by light, shadow, layering, reflections.

EXERCISE 2

This time, take your chosen media (pencils, crayons, etc.) and go around your house or yard and try holding each crayon or marker up close to objects to match them by sight. Is your grass vivid pure green, or a browner shade, yellower, or bluer? Match your colors to your own skin tones. People are never solidly colored from scalp to toe. Palms and foot soles might be paler or redder, eye areas sometimes contain yellow or blue or greenish grey tones. The point here is to show you that while you might automatically think to use green for grass in a drawing or painting, there are actually a number of colors or combinations you could use to make a more realistic picture. Try this exercise with at least twenty different items in various colors. When you discover your real color matches, write down the name of the item in the color you think best matches it...like "Tree Bark" written in burnt umber or light grey if it's a birch!

EXERCISE 3

Try using warm colors to draw the lit areas of a subject and cool areas to draw the shaded parts. Your warm colors include reds, oranges, and yellows. Your cool colors are greens, blues, and purples. Use all of these colors in your drawing, with purple for areas that might be so dark they're black and yellow as your lightest color overall. You may look at an actual picture or item in order to draw it, or draw something from your imagination. Just make sure you know where your main lightsource is and color accordingly.

EXERCISE 4

This one will show you that not everything has to be outlined in black. In the lesson on line drawing where I asked you to draw only the outer edges of something where shadow would fall, you learned that you can draw objects without completely outlining them. Now I'm gonna give you an exercise in Disney-style drawing where things are outlined in a (usually) darker color than the main one used to color the overall object.

I want you to draw a cartoon-style character. Animal or person, it doesn't matter. You may have already practiced drawing a particular character over and over for fun. It's a very common thing for artists to do. If you like, take a pre-existing character like your favorite Disney or anime character. Draw it lightly in pencil first on white paper, keeping your lines as clean as possible. Now decide what colors you want to do each part of the character in. Let's say you've chosen Ariel, The Little Mermaid. Her hair was red. You'll want to draw the outline in pencil or crayon or marker in a darker shade of red than you plan to use on the rest of her hair. These are flat cartoon characters, so we won't worry about shading or highlighting them. Her skin is fair...maybe a light beige or pale orange, so use a browner beige or darker orange or brown orange to outline her skin, then color it in with the lighter shade you want it to be. Use dark purple for her shell top, lighter purple for the shells themselves, dark blue or deep turquiose for her tail with the lighter color blue or turquoise within. The difficult part is deciding where things would overlap and how to outline them. For instance, if you draw her with her hair falling over one shoulder, you'd want her hair outlined in the darker red as mentioned, but stop the outline of her skin where it goes beneath her hair. If her shoulder or face peeks through, in front of her hair, then stop the hair outline color at her skin and outline her skin at that point instead. Draw and color your entire character in this manner. It's a technique often used in Disney films. We're just using it to further show that not everything is outlined in grey or black or even should be. Refer to the art that accompanies this article if you're not sure how to do this exercise. Items that are dark to begin with may be outlined in a lighter shade of that color, like black shoes outlined in grey.

EXERCISE 5

This one is similar to the above exercise, but has you outlining light and shadows before coloring. For this one, you'll need paint. Poster colors, acrylics, oils, or tube watercolors would be best. You want something opague that comes in white as well as other colors.

Choose five solid-colored objects to paint. They can be real items, or imaginary. You can use basic geometric shapes if you like. For now, we'll go back to that apple. This time, let's say your apple is predominantly green. Go ahead and use a pencil if necessary to draw a basic apple shape. It needn't have stem and leaves. Decide where your lightsource is located and paint white over the outline closest to where that lightsource would be. Paint black over where the shadow would fall. Then take green paint and fill in the rest of the apple, using black and white to add a little more depth to where the light strikes and the shadow falls. If you have areas where you're not sure if they'd be outlined in black or white, just fill in to the pencilled edge in green. Do this for all your solid colored objects.

EXERCISE 6

Color reflections are usually very striking and professional looking in art, adding emotion to an otherwise drab subject. Go to your local bookstore and look for jacket art featuring people with blue or green or red light cast on them from one side and you'll see what I mean. Try taking five hand-sized household items and setting them near a window daylight is falling through, one at a time. Beneath them, or immediately beside them without blocking your view of them, set fabric, a tray, or brightly colored piece of paper. We'll use that apple again. Let's make it a yellow one just for fun. Set your apple on a windowsill or table very near a window so that daylight lights it well. Now set an orange very close to it so that an orange reflection strikes the apple from your viewpoint...or set the apple on a sheet of red construction paper so that red bounces up onto the contours of the fruit. Draw the item--sketch-style is fine--and color it, making sure to show the off-color reflection on it just as it looks to you. Don't worry about accuracy, but be careful of blending the colors you use. A yellow apple on red paper might turn into an orange reflection in your art, but don't allow the yellow and red to blend to form orange if what you see before you looks much more red. For extra credit, do this same exercise using metallic objects as your subjects.

EXERCISE 7

Now you're going to color something every darn color but the actual shade it is. Choose five household objects once again. Five basic, easy to draw items are fine like a solid color vase, a lime, a potted plant, your sister, a T-shirt. Limes are usually green, right? I want you to draw the lime, then color it at realistically as possible using any color but green. Try highlights in yellow, shadows in blue. The colors you use can blend and make the color you're not using, but do not actually pick up the color that most closely matches the item's main color. Is your sister brown? Try using reds and oranges with black or white to color a sktech of her. Is the T-shirt blue with a red design on it? Try making it shades of purple, white and green with a purple and orange design.

EXERCISE 8

Choose a single color from your collection of paints, pastels, what have you. Choose randomly if you like. Now go collect at least five items to pose together in a "still life". Arrange them like you're going to sell them in a magazine ad, then make sure you at least one good lightsource striking them. Draw the items, then color them as closely to how they appear to you as possible, but use your one random color on every object, somewhere, at least once. I used purple when I did this, drawing a bowl of assorted fruits next to acandle in front of a window with a heavy drape. Everything in the picture had a purple shadow or reflection on it. It came out looking very soft, a bit surreal, and romantic. This is called "saturation". Use your imagination to place the chosen color on each item, but try and keep things as realistic as you can.

By now, you should have a broader understanding of what colors things are in reality and how to mix colors to achieve different effects like shading and highlights without using outlines or black or white. One of the things I'm best known for in my art is my lack of fear with color. Don't fear any color in your collections of pens or crayons. Find ways to use them all if possible. A colorblind guy I went to school with went on to become a fine artist known for his astounding use of color--particularly in landscapes. If he's not afraid of screwing around in the paintbox, you shouldn't be, either.

Be bold! Color your world! Now go get plenty of practice while I try and dream up next week's pratical art lesson.