Color Sundays

Every Sunday over the next few months, I’ll be presenting ideas about color. Color is a vital subject, but it’s usually not taught very well in most books or in most schools.

Over the last half century, the teaching of color has been dominated by abstract theory. The attempt to objectify color is part of the legacy of modernism. Most color classes have you endlessly painting color swatches or analyzing paint pigments.

While there’s some usefulness to these dry exercises, they don’t help you much in the real world of painting a landscape, designing a graphic novel, or planning an animated film. It would be like teaching music by only teaching the scales, and never getting to the melody.

Color doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s vitally connected to the physics of light and atmosphere. And it has to be considered in relation to our quirky subjective human color perception. Color affects our mood and emotions in ways that recent science is just beginning to explain.

Let’s begin with a couple of basic questions: What does color add to a picture? What would happen if you took color away? If you drained all the color out of Cotopaxi by Frederic Church, you could still tell that you’re looking at the sun setting behind the ash cloud of a volcano.


Or if you removed the color from this picture of two fighting pirates by NC Wyeth, you could still make out the action and the setting clearly enough.


But when you bring on the color, the Church painting hits you with a tidal wave of feeling, a resounding sense of doom.

And Wyeth’s painting suddenly surges with music, romance, and adventure.

Tone may be the root and branch of an image, but color is its fruit and flower.

Color touches something deep in us. I believe that the teaching of color theory has to take all this feeling into account. As artists, we need to know how we can make the most of color, how we can make it express what we want—drama, melancholy, passion, lyricism. Good color has more impact than just about any other aspect of our work.

Whether you paint landscapes, comics, illustration, landscapes, or animation, check out the upcoming Sunday posts.