Associated Study: 🎨 Study 3: Color Key

As promised from last week, here is the white toga painting that I love: 19th century Cesare Mecari’s depiction of the orator Cicero’s overwhelming victory against his political rival, Catiline, in front of the roman Senate circa 63BCE.

Notice how the artist uses space and value to drive home the theme of the picture. The senators sit on the left; Catiline sits be himself on the right. The crowd’s spatial arrangement echoes their frame of mind: they are with cicero.

This is likely not exactly how it happened. Even if the togas are really white this time, archeology reveals that the assembly chamber of the roman senate was little more than a town hall at the time. At a high-profile trial like this, the senators would have been sitting shoulder-to-shoulder: there wouldn’t have been enough real estate to give Catiline his ample, dramatic negative space. Likewise, Catiline’s pose is pure exaggerated villainy: It’s not a pose a real man makes: it is drawn to show his psychological state. (In reality, historians debate whether he was the villain at all: some suspect Cicero of setting him up!)

But isn’t this a grand scene you want to believe in? As we will revisit time and time again in this course: art is not about reality, it’s about telling the Truth.

Now, onto colors!

Speaking of Cicero, he once remarked that rhetoric’s purpose is to “inform, persuade, and entertain.” I think it’s a pretty fitting goal for drawing, which is in many ways, the study of visual rhetoric.

To meet that goal of “inform”, we must be careful about the informational content of our piece. This image is a good demonstration of the perils of color. The picture itself will turn your head, but it sacrifices true informational clarity in its scattered arrangement of color.

Color has an interesting place in composition in that elegance comes from restraint, but conversely, the audience will generally always like it more when you lather a lot on top. In this day and age, can you have your cake and eat it too?

Previously, we had discussed value as a form of information organization. Today, we’ll learn about how to organize information with color.

The simplest form of color design is keeping things mostly desaturated and putting the important parts in more saturated areas.

His lapel is red, but his eyes are REALLY red. It wouldn’t be as impactful if they were the same saturation level. By reserving the most INTENSE red for the most INTENSE point, we preserve visual hierarchy and tell you where to look.

A helpful organization trick is to put a shift in saturation right before a shift in value. This technique is great for cutting a dramatic terminator line.

You can push this boundary effect to quite an extreme level:

Unlike value, color has an extra dimension, on top of intensity (We are modelling saturation as intensity here). You can think of this as hue. Since hue itself is a multi-dimensional subject, we collapse it down to one dimension, so we can use it to sort information.

Niji scenic models the design of its color space after a certain… trend in modern cinema.

Since orange and blue are opposites on the spectrum from warm to cold, a lot of movie shots are graded orange and blue!

So when a movie comes along which is not graded orange and blue, it really stands out

So, you despair, if I wish to be an elegant color designer, I can only either compose in monochrome, limit myself to orange and blue, or be a maverick that invents an entire genre? That can’t be right!

This is the secret to color: you can use a lot of it when it is a secondary organization technique after value is already organized.

Do you notice something curious about this picture?

The shadows are full of color. But it doesn’t look distracting at all!

As long as we can still squint and see the black and white drawing from last class, the picture is organized!

Ok. If that’s the case, why can’t I simply put color onto a black-and-white drawing?

Color space is not linear. It’s curvy and some colors hog more numbers than others.

Interestingly, the opposite also holds true. When colors match in value, they can be used interchangeably.

One simple trick to master color:

Put the colors side by side and squint.

If the two colors appear to be the same level of brightness, you can use them about interchangeably, even if they are very different!

If the two colors do not appear to be the same level of brightness, you can’t use them interchangeably.

increasing the saturation, without touching the hue, also darkens the value

shifting the hue, without touching saturation or brightness, also changes the value

Once you can find the value equivalents, you will find that you can get away with a lot of color without sacrificing the organization of the picture

This ends our lessons on “measurement.” Remember, the purpose of these techniques is to provide a way to break down complicated ideas into simple ones, so that you can analyze paintings with ease. If this were an rpg, I suppose you can say that these three core exercises are the fundamentals of the “appraisal” skill.

Study 1: Measuring With Your Eyes

Study 2: Notan

Study 3: Color Key

We’ll take a break now from lecture to let you practice for a month. The 5 lessons following this will teach you how to arrange the information you have analyzed into something truly your own!

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