Name: Colour Harmony - 10 Minutes To Better Painting - Episode 5
Uploaded: 2025-03-14T02:19:57.000Z
Duration: 10 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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Break out your pocket watch and your paintbrushes because it's time for episode 5 of 10 minutes to better painting.

Let's roll right into part one, shall we?

Say hello to multiple time pre to West winner Morgan Weisling.

When asked about his color mixing, Morgan said, I don't know what I'm mixing.

The colors on my palette are like a piano and I'm just hitting the keys.

Okay, I appreciate the insight, Morgan, but that doesn't quite help me with this whole color.

Oh, look, it's world renowned watercolor artist Joseph Zabuckvich.

Maybe he can spare some knowledge about color.

He says, I don't look at the colors on my palette.

There's a warm side, a cool side, and a few odds and ends in the middle.

Now maybe it's just me, but that advice sounds like it's coming from people who don't know how to use color, but that's a Morgan Weisling painting and that's a Joseph Zabuckvich painting and the colors in both of them are beautiful.

Today's lesson is about color harmony and color harmony sounds intimidating.

It always struck me as one of those elite color theories that a lowly student like me would never be able to understand.

And there was a kernel of truth in the way Weisling and Zabuckvich talked about color a moment ago in the sense that there's just something indescribable about the effect these colors have together.

But despite that, let's not go any further without having a working definition of color harmony.

Well, we know what color is, so let's look up harmony real quick.

Harmony, the combination of simultaneously sounded musical notes to produce a pleasing effect.

So let's just change that word there and these two words here and that word there.

Color harmony, the combination of simultaneously displayed colors that produce a pleasing effect.

To achieve color harmony, the first thing we have to do is overcome our limited acquaintance with color.

But sadly, understanding colors by their names is actually quite limiting.

And to show that, I'm going to take this gray swatch of color and paint it into this Edgar Payne landscape.

And when I do that, something funny happens.

That gray suddenly looks a little orange.

And when I bump up its value slightly so it fits here, it doesn't resemble orange at all.

And just for reference, that was the same gray.

So how does such a minuscule difference in the color picker result in such a massive difference in the painting?

The reason is, grays communicate with each other.

You see, pure saturated colors like this have a very hard time communicating.

They feel more like a loud party where everyone's shouting.

Here's another attempt at that painting, only this time with grayer versions of those colors.

I hope you can agree that this alone is producing a more harmonious effect.

I need to come up with a cool image that everyone's going to remember.

We're right in sync with the new Star Wars film.

This is the 2017 model with a color wheel on it.

And I'll need a captain for this example.

Han Solo's job is to make sure that all these colors in the Rebel Alliance are communicating their plans to each other.

As we saw earlier, these colors are all shouting right now.

And you can't command a Rebel ship with that kind of chaos.

He brings the colors in closer together so they don't have to shout anymore.

When colors are less saturated like this, they begin to talk to each other.

And as with any conversation, they gain a common ground.

Well, as far as color harmony goes, it's that all the colors are now based on relative degrees of gray.

In this example, the colors are all at the same relative level of gray.

Maybe something like this on our Millennium Falcon.

This is okay, but it doesn't have to be equal like this.

If I now did this and brought in some more saturated colors that are layered over top of those common grays, watch the transition as the saturated colors that were once too loud now carry real weight in this color conversation.

Here's that Joseph Zabuckvich painting again.

And I specifically want to look at this area here.

There's a very subtle conversation between oranges and blues that make up that wall.

Now you might be saying, but Han, how did he pull that off?

Orange and blue are at opposite ends of the color wheel.

Well, he started with an orangish color and probably used the force to bring it into about here.

And keep your eye up here too, as I plot these colors on the actual painting as well.

Anyway, that first color choice you make is actually not that relevant yet.

So let's invite other colors into the conversation.

One thing you can do is add subtle variations on that color.

This kind of gets the conversation started and it's pretty easy to do.

This is a good start, but you might not want the color to only exist on one side of the color wheel like that.

There's a lot of opportunity to carry the conversation into here.

And in my judgment, he brings in just two more colors to do it.

This color starts talking to the blues by moving towards them.

And then this color actually completes the journey into the blues.

Now to be sure, those are very gray colors, but this painting proves that our eyes are extremely sensitive to these subtle changes.

Let's now zoom back out and notice one more layer of color harmony.

He's accenting those grays by using very saturated versions of them in the boats below.

I think this is a brilliant move because now those colors are speaking to each other across multiple objects, the entire frame, and uses a wide variety of grays to really fill out the color conversation.

Now let's recall the Morgan Weisling painting.

Although this is painted in a different style and in a different medium, it builds its color harmony in just the same way.

For instance, I'm sure your astute eyes can now detect that some of those bluish grays in the quilt are talking to those reds in the girl's dress.

And looking back at our gray swatches, I think we can now appreciate what was happening here.

The reason two similar grays can look so different is because they're having two different conversations.

The gray in the shadows that looks kind of orange looks that way because it was talking to blues.

The other gray looks almost bluish in its context because it was talking to these colors and well, it was the bluest part of that conversation.

So I think we should give our two friends here a pass on their vague comments about color earlier.