The Colour Attributes of Paintings
In order to understand a phenomenon, one must be able to navigate it: to name its parts and to know its up from its down. Colour is a great challenge in this respect, being dimensionally very complex. This chapter examines the ways in which colour is unde
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The Colour Attributes of Paintings
Abstract In order to understand a phenomenon, one must be able to navigate it: to name its parts and to know its up from its down. Colour is a great challenge in this respect, being dimensionally very complex. This chapter examines the ways in which colour is understood in the visual art domain. Of particular focus is contrast and the many forms that it takes. Firstly, we examine RYB, HSL and other colour spaces and describe the role that they played in our work. We also detail the work of Johannes Itten (1888-1967) whose writings on colour contrast informed a lot of our research. A painter’s colour-thinking is high-level, addressing the structure-based contrast properties of a painting. This structure takes many forms: per region, per object, as a whole across the entire painting, between regions and objects, etc. These we describe and exemplify. We also address the role that they played in our research. The so-called colour harmony describes as high-level principles the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ colour contrasts. We detail historical and contemporary ideas on the subject, much of which has its roots in the work of early twentieth-century mystics. Using this work as a starting point, and the work of the Impressionist painters as reference, we offer our own simple rules of hue harmony. Keywords Colour harmony · Contrast · Colour theory
2.1 Painters, Paint and Colour Systems In the engineering domain, the image attributes of a digital colour image are generally understood through the Red, Green and Blue (RGB) values of its pixels. These are known as the photometric attributes of an image. In the art domain, photometrication is less straightforward, requiring reference to multiple systems. Painters are particularly familiar with the physical property of paint. Paint is composed of a binder (essentially a glue), an extender (to give bulk) and the pigment. It is the pigment that supplies the colour to the paint. The name of the pigment may be derived from the name of the element or compound from which it is derived © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018 X. Zhang et al., Computational Approaches in the Transfer of Aesthetic Values from Paintings to Photographs, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-3561-6_2
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2 The Colour Attributes of Paintings
(e.g. cadmium red), from a natural object which embodies that colour (e.g. lemon yellow) or practically anything else (such as Payne’s Grey, named after the artist William Payne). Each paint has different physical properties (drying times, glossiness, etc.), different behaviour (e.g. alizarin crimson is dark when applied thickly, but lighter when applied thinly) and different cost (emerald green used to be made from emeralds). From artist to artist, there is a huge amount of variance in what particular paints are employed. This variance is across time (some pigments being unavailable before the modern era) [12], and also differs from artist to artist [6] (e.g. some artists favour a more saturated pallet than others). The painter organis
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