Virtual Art Academy

Color: The Secrets To Beautiful Color Harmony

A small section of Raybould's painting showing beautiful brushwork

This is a package of all the six eBooks in the Virtual Art Academy® Building Block™: Color.

Color is what creates excitement in a painting. Here we are concerned with the design aspect of color — how to use it effectively in the abstract design of a painting to create the music in your work. It starts by giving you a review of all the basic knowledge you need to know about color, including its attributes of hue, value, and saturation, the key color wheels including the Munsell system, and the basic color harmony strategies for simple analogous and complementary schemes to more advanced schemes such as the double split complementary scheme and the adulterated primary scheme.
Building on this knowledge you will learn more advanced principles used by the master colorists, such as the principle of mouse colors, color vibration and optical mixing, and value compression using constant saturation scales.

Here are some sample pages from the books.

Course Unit 1 – Key Concepts
color wheels – complements – triadic color wheel –munsell color wheel – tints & shades – secondary colors – vivid colors & biases

Course Unit 2 – Palettes
choosing a palette – thirteen palettes from monochrome to vivid full spectrum – organizing your palette

Course Unit 3 – Grays
making grays – low saturation fields – complementary contrast – Godlove’s principle – darks, lights, grays – middle value ranges

Course Unit 4 – Color Harmonies
balanced – complementary – analogous – hybrid color harmonies

Course Unit 5 – Poly-Isochromes and Spectrum Palettes
Birren color triangle – mono-isochromes and chiaroscuro – poly-isochromes – Ostwald/Munsell tone scales – tonal influence – composing on the palette

Course Unit 6 – Advanced Color Strategies
luster – iridescence – luminosity – color preferences – color threads – color bridges – nine-pile gradations – glowing whites – keying whites – camouflage

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