Welcome to a Week of Practices Exploring COLOR
Color surrounds us in our daily lives. We choose colors to decorate our homes, as well as for our clothing and accessories.
Light impacts how we see color; colors in our environment may appear brighter or more subdued depending on the time of day. Generally, yellow is the brightest color, however in certain light just before dusk, green can seem to glow in a distinct way.
As we begin to talk about colors, we can describe them with a few different attributes:
Hue
Value
Intensity
Temperature
Hue refers to the color name such as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple.
Value is how light or dark a color is; for example pink is very light red.
Intensity is also sometimes described as the level of saturation of a color. If you think of paint, the most intense colors are the ones right out of the tube, the least intense are the ones that have been mixed with white or gray or black to create more diluted shades and tints. I think of color intensity particularly in winter on gray days when a pop of intense color from a car, flower pot, or child’s coat is likely to especially stand out.
We use temperature to divided colors into warm and cool. Generally the warm colors are fire colors: red, orange, and yellow. The cool colors are water colors: green, blue and purple.
