Color is the oil painter’s first language, and a little theory goes a long way in the studio. The essential map is the color wheel: three primary colors, red, yellow, and blue; three secondary colors, orange, green, and violet, made by mixing pairs of primaries; and the tertiary colors between them. Around this wheel the painter organizes every decision about hue, value, and intensity.
Three properties describe any color. Hue is the color’s name, its place on the wheel. Value is its lightness or darkness, the amount of light it carries; a painter can check value by squinting or by looking through a red filter, and value, not color, does most of the work of making a picture read. Intensity, also called saturation or chroma, is the color’s purity, its distance from gray. A cadmium red at full intensity is loud; the same red mixed with a little of its complement, green, becomes a quiet brick tone. Understanding these three dimensions lets the painter describe the world with a handful of pigments.
Two further ideas complete the toolkit. The first is temperature. Colors are warm or cool, yellow and red warm, blue and green cool, and the contrast of warm against cool is one of the strongest tools in painting: a warm face against a cool shadow, a warm sun against a cool sky. The second is optical mixing. When small strokes of different colors are laid side by side, the eye blends them at a distance, and the result is livelier than any mechanically premixed color. The Impressionists built their entire method on this effect.
The practical rules follow. Mix colors on the palette, not on the canvas, and mix deliberately, testing the result against the subject. To dull a color, mix in its complement rather than black. Keep your values more decisive than your hue, and make your shadows cool where your lights are warm. The greatest colorists, from Titian to Monet to Matisse, were not painters who used many colors; they were painters who understood the few they used with complete clarity.
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