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How to decorate practically Anything using Color Theory

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If you are a painter it is helpful to know a bit about color theory and the hue, value and chroma of pigments. Color theory is essential in the visual arts when it comes to mixing color.

There are more than a couple of factors when it comes to describing the hue, value and chroma of color. The value and chroma of a color has to do w89th how dark it is and how saturated the color is. Color saturation ranges from intense to dull in hue. Color chroma ranges from light to dark and becomes as basic as white versus black. The actual hue of the color refers to what it exactly is – purple, yellow, green, red, pink etc.

Color theory originated hundreds of years ago. The first one was designed by Sir Isaac Newton in 1666. The wheel is designed so that any of the colors in it will look great together. There are many different types and versions of color wheels in existence.

There are number of color combinations that are considered especially attractive when put together. In painting these are known as color harmonies or color chords.

Color wheels can be primary, secondary and tertiary. The primary colors are red, yellow and blue. The three secondary colors are green orange and purple. Another six tertiary colors are created by missing the primary and secondary colors together.

Furthermore colors can be divided into warm and cool hues. The warmer ones are vivid and energetic and tend to liven up the energy emanating from a painting. Cool colors are soothing and give an impression of calm.

There are three hues that are considered o be neutral. These are white, black and gray. These colors are also used to make different tints, shades and tones. A tint is created by adding white to pure hue. A shade is created by adding black to a pure hue and a tone is created by adding gray to a pure hue.

Complementary colors oppose each other on the color wheel. They are high contrast, have full saturation and look vibrant. An analogous color scheme uses color that is next to each other on the color wheel and usual match well. A triadic color scheme uses colors in threes that are evenly spaced around the color wheel. A split-complimentary color scheme sues two colors adjacent to its complement on the wheel.

There are many more variations on how colors can be used using a color wheel and if you are a serious painter you will find the possibilities to be endless and exciting when it comes to creating wonderful works of art.

How to Decorate Using Grayscale, Value charts, and Value Relativity

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Creating a grayscale in painting means that you are creating value charts that determine the relativity of blacks to white in your painting. This type of value relativity goes from black at the weakest intensity to white at the strongest.

Grayscale images are also called monochromatic images. This is because they do not contain any color at all. Images that contain only black and white are known as binary images or bi-level images. The grayscale is more identified with photography than it is with painting.

Monochrome palettes only have some shades of gray and do not deviate that far from black and white. A monochromatic palette might only have eight, sixteen or 24 colors in it. Monochromatic graphics typically have a black background with a white or gray image but the opposite – a white background with black and grey graphics is also possible too.

Even more limited is a two bit gray scale which consists of only the colors black and white and two shades of gray. A four bit grayscale consists of black and white and fourteen shades of gray. We often see the four bit grayscale at use in primitive computer graphics.

In oil, acrylic or other types of painting the purpose may be to convert color images to grayscale. This can sometimes be done on a computer using pixels. The pixilated image then can be referred to by the painter to create a painting out of tones of gray or a monochromatic painting to which the same color applies again and again.

Converting color to grayscale can get quite complicated. It has to do with obtaining the values of the primary colors in the image. This is any of the red, blue or green values in the image. It is 30% of the red value, 59% of the green value, and 11% of the blue value that usually make up the gray scale.

The classic grayscale is a color mode that is made up of 256 shades of gray. These are known as monochrome and RGB palettes. Each palette is represented by aeries of color swatches.

Black and white drawings are sometimes referred to as grayscale drawings but for the most part this is inaccurate. Grayscale drawings must be made up of shades of gray as in a pencil drawing with cross hatching. Line drawings that are strictly made from black and white space are technically known as bit-maps.