COLORS 🌈

Color constancy

Color constancy is our brain percieving an object as the same color, even under various lighting conditions. For example, a lemon will appear yellow on a sunny day, cast in shadow, or under a red spotlight. Our brains are able to separate the color of the objects from the color of the light. This is obvious, but where this gets fun is when it comes to painting! It's easy to paint a scene that takes place midday, where the subjects receive direct, white light from the sun; you just paint with the colors you see. but if you want to paint a bluejay during a sunset, you have to account for sunset's orange tint. When the entire scene is more orange, you also have to make the blue more orange. so how do you make a BLUE more orange??? by making it GRAY! Because everything else around the bird is orange, the technically-gray bird will appear blue in relation. this practice in art is called "color relativity" and it's the idea that the same color will appear different depending on the colors surrounding it. I'm so inspired by the painters who are able to master the illusion of colored light through painting.

And now with the advant of digital technology, you can now color pick certain parts of photos and paintings and see what colors they really are. And it's so fun to do when you're studying color theory as a digital painter. You'll be surprised by how many greens are actually just some shade of gray! or how many blues are actually green or purple in hue! Color relativity applies to anything you're painting in colored light, but the coolest examples involve pure gray looking so much like a different color.