Color theory guide

I wanted to present to you my approach and my understanding of color theory. I know most of those
things won't be new and many tutorials are depicting this topic. Most of my approach is inspired by
some detailed descriptions made by James Gourney that can be found on his blog and in his book
„Color and Light”. I will show you how I use this knowledge on my projects and how I plan colors
just to generate contrast and focus on specific places on the miniature. So let's start with the basics.

The first that is important to mention is that there are three artibutes that define colors:
1. Value (light vs dark or white vs. black),
2. Chroma (saturation, purity, strenght, intentisy),
3. Hue (the name of the color: red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta)

When painting miniatures we can use those attributes just to operate with colors but also to focus
the attention of the viewer and make coherent color schemes. The value of color is strongly
combined with the light source we want to represent on our work. This will influence the brightness
and darkness of the color. With chroma and hue, we can focus the attention of the viewer just on the
specific very saturated colors compared to desaturated ones that are pushed to the background.

To use this first let's talk about primary and secondary colors and also about the basic color wheel
and how we can use it. There are many classifications of primary colors because the color theory
was with many different approaches. At first, the primary colors ware red, yellow and blue (RYB).
Mixing those three colors with additions of white and black to change the value should give us the
possibility to mix all other colors. So let's look at the basic color wheel.

This color wheel represents what colors we can achieve by mixing the primary colors in different
ratios. Now let's show just the Primary colors.
Just by mixing those primary colors in even proportions we can achieve the following secondary
colors.

We can also separate all the intermediate colors that are made by mixing primary and secondary
colors in even proportions.

The next thing worth pointing out is analogous colors that are close in hue to each other so, for
example, it would be orange and yellow and their intermediate color. Those colors are very similar
in hue and when placed close to each other on painting the generate just a little differences.

Colors that are opposed to each other are called complementary. This is a very important part
because we can use those colors to generate big differences by showing opposing colors that also
have a different temperature.
We can also use split complementary colors. The split-complementary color scheme is a variation
of the complementary color scheme. In addition to the base color, it uses the two colors adjacent to
its complement. Those colors also generate a difference and give contrast but not that strong as a
directly complementary color. I use such colors very often because it's very helpful when planing
color triads and I will talk about this later in this tutorial.

The whole color wheel can be separated into two halves. One half has warm colors and the other
has cold colors. Both halves generate contrast and using only colors from one side can generate a
cold or war atmosphere on our work.
Adding white or black to all colors placed on this color wheel we can change the value. Adding
white we will achieve bright colors called Tints.

Adding black to all colors we will achieve Shades.

So those are just the basics. There are also other color systems where there are other primary colors
or the color wheel is three dimensional and shows the lightness, saturation, and hue. I encourage
you to check the Munsell color wheel and also CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black) and
RGB primary color systems used in color photography or printing.

So knowing the basics we can talk about

color compositions. Most of the time I use
the YRMBCG color wheel that uses six
primary colors and those are Yellow, Red,
Magenta, Blue, Cyan, Green. This color
wheel I have seen in materials presented by
James Gourney and I think that adding more
primary colors gives more flexibility and
has more fully saturated colors for color
composition and mixing. Also, it's important
to notice that here on this color wheel we
can see that the middle of the wheel is a
point of neutral grey that we can achieve by
mixing two complementary colors in even
proportions. All the colors close to the
middle of the wheel are more and more
desaturated to the point of grey.
This is helpful because we can desaturate by mixing them with complementary colors or just neutral
grey. Adding complementary colors makes better and rich color mixes and adding just neutral grey
purely desaturates the color but it also makes the colors dull.

Gamut masking.

This is a concept that I use very often to plan the whole color composition on my miniatures. Of
course, it's not my idea but I use this as a very helpful tool just to plan the whole composition,
contrast of colors and temperature and just to make everything coherent. So underneath you can see
a gamut mask that I would consider being based on a basic color triad or red, green and blue.

So you can see I just marked a triangle combining the points of saturated red, green and blue. All
the colors that are inside the triangle are the colors that we can use. The rest I darkened just to have
a clear view and to make the gamut mask. In this case, the primary colors that we can use are
marked as "A" and all the secondary colors are marked as "B". Note that all secondary colors can be
used as complementary colors to the primary colors and this gives us a cool guide just how we can
achieve cool color contrasts. So we can use fully saturated primary colors and half saturated
secondary colors. Of course on our miniature, the difference will be very visible and the primary
colors will focus a lot of attention and all the secondary colors will be pushed to the background.
We can use those secondary colors just to boost contrast. We also see that we can use every color
but only three will be fully saturated and the rest will have different degrees of saturation so this
will require some paint mixing. It's also important to just know your paint range and to know where
your pigments place on the color wheel even if they are with additions of white and black.

Ok now let's look at some basic variations of the gamut masking process. First of let's look at a
Cyan, Magenta, Yellow color triad.
You can see it's just made by choosing different points to mark the primary colors. This is also a
basic triad but we know that we cant use fully saturated green, red and blue because it would be just
too much.

Ok, next up we can make a color triad just by using the split complementary colors. This is also
very interesting because we are limiting the colors by a lot but we still have the full range of colors
although many of them will be desaturated. All primary colors in such composition will be very
visible on the finished miniature. Also, we can see that there will be a lot of focus on just warm
colors contrasted by the cold blue color.
Of course, we don't have to limit ourselves just to color triads and even proportions. Take a look at
those two gamut masks.

Here you can see that I cut out most of the cold colors and we will have a lot of focus on the
contrast between warm green and magenta and of course we can add yellow. It's good to have the
point of grey in the gamut triangle but it's not always needed.

On this gamut mask, you can see that not every primary color we will use must be fully saturated.
This will shift the focus on the fully saturated yellow that will be visible outright in our work and
both magenta and blue will be pushed a little into the background.
You can see that we can operate with this very freely and the whole gamut mask can have even
different shapes like this one. Of course, it works as long as you have an idea and as long as you
want to focus the attention of the viewer on certain things on your work.

So here we have a big focus on just two complementary colors. We can use the rest but they will be
very desaturated.

Looking at this color composition that we will have a lot of focus on green, yellow, red but they
would not be fully saturated. All of those colors would be just contrasted by blue. We could use this
color to darken different colors and to add temperature contrasts or also just as some very striking
elements of our work that will focus a lot of attention.

In this color composition, you can see that you can make some other experiments just to show some
very strong contrasts. I used a similar color composition on my version of the Nalani bust I have
painted some time ago.

I just used magenta to focus the attention on the tips of her hair but it was intentional and this
contrasted the whole work. The rest was mostly painted with very desaturated orange/yellow, jade,
turquoise, and blue. I used a lot of turquoises just in all the shades and this also represented a
colored light being reflected from the ground. So you can see I had a very limited color palette but
this conveyed a cold look to the whole miniature.

Now let's look at some examples of how we can use this knowledge in practice. First up let's look at
my latest miniature of Harley Quinn.

You can see that in this miniature I used a lot of saturated colors and I marked this on the gamut
mask for you to see. I did not want to use any saturated yellow, blue and green colors just to make
the composition coherent. Of course, you can see some desaturated Yellow and just small additions
of darker blue here and there but that is all. The rest was painted mostly with three primary colors
and the secondary colors also give contrast just by being in the background.

We can prepare a gamut mask before painting a miniature and just pick the colors for our whole
gamut mask and then we have a nice guide that we can check every time and from my experience
doing it so will give you a very coherent composition.

In the next photo, you can see the Luz New York bust that I painted some time ago and here I also
wanted to limit the whole color composition and to make her similar to the original artworks.

As you can see most of the miniature is in warm brown/yellow colors and it's just contrasted with
the complementary blue color coming from underneath the miniature. This generated a nice cold
ambiance and also boosted all the warm colors on the whole miniature. Painting the whole bust in
just warm colors would make it to much monochromatic and I did not want that.

On the next miniature, you can see that I use a lot of complementary colors of just Yellow and
Magenta. I added some hints fo blue here and there but most of the miniature was painted just using
warm white, oranges, and black. This is maybe very limited but also I had a lot of freedom to use
different desaturated colors. I wanted a big contrast between the warm yellow colors and the
magenta/purple colors coming from the base. Also, I use this often just to integrate the miniature
with the base and its surroundings.
Also on Lady Sybilla I have done the same just by painting a strong contrast between all the warm
red tones and the blue light illuminating her from the bottom, from the back and just all around.
This gave me a lot of contrast and showed a lot more warmth of all those red tones.
So you can see this can be used in many different ways and you should be very open to just
experiment with different ideas. Most of the time I have an idea of what I want to show on my
miniature and what places I want to show using light, color contrast and gamut masking are one of
the tools that I use for this. Also in time you just do it instinctively and you don't have to plan that
much. I encourage you to experiment with this knowledge and I hope this will help you. Although it
is just a part of color theory knowledge, but it's a part I use very often on my miniatures.

Cheers,
REDAV