Bauhaus 7 Contrasts of Colour
What job is colour doing in a picture? I've been going down a colour theory rabbit hole. Here are 7 ways to use colour. How many of the them do you use?
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Hello!
I hope you’ve had a good summer. I’ve just finished 50 days of drawing from life in the 3 Materials Drawing Challenge. Congrats to all those who took part too! It was brilliant to see all the sketches each day.
In an earlier post I talked about setting myself goals in the challenge to help me focus and learn during the 50 days.
One of the ideas was to explore the 7 contrasts of colour as identified by Johannes Itten in his 1961 book The Art of Color.
Each day I learned about a different way to use colour and applied it to my sketch in the challenge. I realised that some of the contrasts were familiar to me and I was already using them in my work, but others were new and exciting to experiment with.
I find explanations of colour theory generally hard to understand but the book gave lots of examples which I’m sharing with you here.
Colour can do so many jobs:
Colour can be used to create atmosphere and feeling, focus a viewer’s attention, denote a time of year or a point in history.
I love playing with colour in my work and these experiments really made me focus on the job of colour in a picture.
So here we go…
1. Contrast of hue
The most straightforward of the 7 contrasts. The colours are undiluted and intense. It can express ‘boisterous joviality, profound grief, earthly simplicity and cosmic universality’ (p.37, The Art of Color). Blue, red and yellow provide the most striking contrast. ‘Obvious combinations’ mentioned are red/blue/green; blue/yellow/violet; yellow/green/violet/red; violet/green/blue/orange/black.
