Thread by @janzendesign

It's Saturday, im on the train, and I am having THOUGHTS about local colour and how to teach people to use colour in art.

I prefer personally to use colour less realistically and more emotionally. I have said that local colour is for chumps. Lets be chumps TOGETHER. Thread?

The world is color coded. As humans we are presented with a wealth of visual information. And we reduce it all down to basics. The sun is yellow the sky is blue and the grass is green.

This schema is necessary. Our lives depend on recognising certain shapes and colours 2/

In as many lighting and atmospheric conditions as possible. Stop signs and food. Danger and opportunity.

But this coding actually impairs our ability to see and represent local colour in paintings. Because the actual colour of a thing is often different from the symbol. 3/

So we have simplified the world i order to navigate it. To represent it, we must recomplicare everything. Take apart all of the symbols, reinterpret them, and then, usually, resimplify them in a different way, apart from the usual, to communicate...something. Thst part is up 4/

To you.

Thus, colour. It exists. It has its own cultural meanings, and you can manipulate and make use of those to communicate. This is not necessarily separate from using it in the pursuit of realism. Consider Snow white's apple. Why is it most often depicted red? Apples 6/

Can be green. Or pink and yellow. The apple is red because red has meaning. Sexuality and passion and maturity and anger.

If the apple was green, it could be immaturity/unripeness & poison. If it was the wrong green it would be confusing because green also means health/life 7/

Local colour can be manipulated to communicate meaning. Emotion. It's more subtle than painting a boy all in blue because you are sad, but also less daring and immediate

Realistic local colour as I understand it has two components. But I'm about to get off the train so later! 8/

Hmmm should mention I can't speak much to colour blindness. And that these are just musings from XP and art school. Ok.

So you want to do local colour. In an art piece. You have two things to think about. Can you see the colour and can you recreate it? 9/

Can you see the colour? Is the apple red? Are shadows grey? We think the car is blue so we colour it flat blue and wonder why it is wrong. The reality is that both shiny and matte objects pick up colour from everything around them. Reflected light. 10/

If you're not looking for it, you might never have noticed it. You can use every colour in your paint kit to get skin colour. Whatever colour that skin is, because human skin is both reflective and slightly transparent. Hold up your hands to a strong lightsource if you doubt 11/

I can't/won't talk more details but let us just say that if you want realistic local colour, try not to paint the lemon yellow. Look for all the colours you didn't think were there ever before. 12/

So you are seeing every colour. Can you recreate everything you see? Not necessarily. Every media has massive technical limitations. A digital piece by its very nature is backlit. Certain pigments, no matter how hard you try will never achieve a certain hue that you want. 13/

This for me is an opportunity disguised as a problem. If you're trying to mix paint and you get reall hung up on a colour, just step back and look for the overall lights and darks. Then consider the temperature. Realistic local colour doesn't have to be accurate to look real 14/

If you take anything away from this twitter rant, let it be that in order to see all the colours in an object, you must forget what that object is a symbol of, and look for everything you never thought was there. 15/15