Year 7 Visual Arts Term 1

1. Looking at colour Year 7 Visual Arts Term 1

2. Work to be started today.

3. Homework due next lesson

4. The visible spectrum of colours that we can see ranges between red at one end and violet at the other end. This is what we see when we look at a rainbow.

5. Although the colours in fact gradually change from one to another as you move through the spectrum we could say that there are six noticeably different colours. These are red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. Hue is another word for colour.

6. Primary Colours Primary colours are pure colours and can not be mixed. These colours come straight out of the tube. These colors form the basis of all other colours.

7. Secondary Colours It is possible to mix orange (from red and yellow), green (from yellow and blue) and violet (from blue and red). Orange, green and violet are therefore called secondary colours.

8. Tertiary colours are made by mixing a secondary and a primary colour together. Some examples of tertiary colours are red-violet and yellow-green. red   +   violet  =  red-violet yellow   +   green  =  yellow-green

9. Complementary colours • The best way to make a colour really stand out is to put it next to another colour that is completely different from it. Such pairs of colours are known as ‘complementary colours’ or opposite colours

10. Vincent Van Gogh a Dutch artist loved using complementary colours in his painting. In this self portrait you can see the orange of his hair and beard contrasting against the blue in the rest of the composition.

11. Here is another painting by Van Gogh called `Sunflowers’. Has he used complementary colour in this painting?

12. On the other hand a picture consisting mainly of red, orange or yellow will tend to produce a hot, busy, or happy feel.

13. Harmonious colours Harmonious coloursor analogous colours arecolours that are next to each other on the colour wheel. For instance, red, orange and violet might be used together. Or, a more closely harmonious grouping might be yellow, yellow-green and yellow-orange

14. Polychromatic. Polychromatic is the final common colour combination. It consists of groupings of many different colours in the same bed or border. This is a very difficult combination to create successfully. It can be done but it takes a keen eye

15. Warm and Cool Colours Another way of looking at ‘hues’ is to see them as ‘warm’ or ‘cool’ colours. The colour circle can be seen as being divided into a warm half (centred on the orange) and a cool half (centred on the blue).

16. Putting together areas of orange and blue will therefore result in a contrast of warm against cool as well as a contrast of complementary colours.

17. The choice of the dominant colours in a painting will have a major effect on the way that the work looks when it is finished. A painting consisting predominantly of blues will have a cool, pensive or sad feel.

18. Warm colours appear to come out towards you while cool colours appear to go back into the distance. This is called atmospheric perspective.

19. Monochromatic colour. Mono means one and chroma means colour in Latin. Artists can mix monochromatic colour by using one colour and mixing into it either white (tint) to make the colour lighter or black (shade) to make it darker. These colour schemes have a calming effect.