COLORS

A. WHAT IS COLOR? 3. Tertiary Colors – combinations of

two secondary colors.
COLOR is the art element that can only
be perceived visually.  Citrine = green + orange
 Olive = green + violet
B. QUALITIES OR DIMENSIONS OF  Russet = orange + violet
COLORS
4. Intermediate Colors
1. Hue – the name of a color.  Yellow-green
 Red  Yellow-orange
 Blue  Blue-green
 Green  Blue-violet
 Red-orange
2. Value – the lightness or darkness of
 Red-violet
a color.
 Red-orange
a. Tint – produced when white is
added to a color or hue. 5. Quaternary Colors – mixture of
 Pink is a tint of red tertiary colors.
b. Shade –produced when black,  Buff = russet + olive
gray, or its complement is added  Sage = olive + citrine
to a color or hue.  Plum = russet + citrine
 Maroon is a shade of red
6. Neutral Colors
3. Chroma or intensity – indicates a
 White = lightest color
color’s degree of purity, strength, or
 Black = darkest color
saturation. It tells how bright or how
 Gray = black + white
dull a color can be.
 Brown = mixture of three primary
 Scarlet is red of high intensity. colors in unequal quantities with
more of red and yellow.
C. CLASSIFICATION OF COLORS  Metallic colors = gold,
aluminium, silver, bronze
1. Primary Colors – the root of all
colors.
D. COLOR SYSTEMS
 Red
 Yellow 1. Prang System – Based on the
 Blue Brewster-Newton theory, this system
deals with primary, secondary, and
2. Secondary Colors – mixture of any tertiary colors. There are 12 basic
two primary colors. hues in the Prang color system,
 Orange = red + yellow three primaries, three secondaries,
 Violet = red + blue and six intermediates.
 Green = yellow + blue
 2. Munsell System – This system  red, yellow-green and blue-
disregards primary and secondary green
colors, because according to  yellow, red-violet and blue-
Munsell, such gives an excess of violet
orange and yellow in the color wheel. c. Double Complementary Harmony
Instead, the system establishes five – a combination of two directly
principal hues: red, yellow, green, adjacent colors and their
blue, and purple. The five complements in the color wheel.
intermediate hues are yellow-red,  orange, red-orange, blue, and
green-yellow, blue-green, blue- blue green.
purple, and red-purple. Regarding
d. Double Split Complementary
orange and violet as mere shades of
Harmony – a four-color
fruits and flowers, Munsell has 10
combination obtained by splitting
basic hues, compared to 12 in the
both ends of the complement.
Prang System. Of the two systems,
 red, orange, green, blue
the latter is easier to conceptualize.

e. Triad Harmony - a combination in

E. COLOR HARMONY
which the three colors are so
1. Related Color Harmony placed in the color wheel as to
mark out the three points of an
a. Monochromatic Harmony –
equilateral triangle.
combines different intensities or
 red, blue, yellow
values of one color only.
 orange, green, violet
 blue, light blue, dark blue
 red, pink, maroon 3. Neutral-And-A-Color Harmony – a
b. Analogous Harmony – a combination of a color and black,
combination of two or more white, gray or brown.
neighboring colors in the color
chart.
 yellow, green, yellow green

2. Contrasting Color Harmony

a. True Complementary Harmony –
a combination of colors which are
directly opposite each other in the
color wheel.
 red and green
 yellow-orange and blue-violet
b. Split Complementary Harmony –
a combination of a primary or an
intermediate color in the color
wheel with colors on each side of
its complement, that is, a scheme
of colors so placed in the color
wheel as to describe the letter Y.