GoldBrush Academy
Turn the harmony filter over the wheel, like the card wheel on a studio wall. Its windows show which colours go with yours, with their tints, tones and shades, and which tubes of paint will give them to you.
Drag the filter to turn it, or tap a colour on the wheel. Arrow keys work too.
One colour leads, one supports, one sparks. The same palette in a painting and in a room or a web page.
The closest single tubes, transparent paints first, with the water they need. Screen colours are approximations; a swatch on your own paper is the final word.
Hue is the name of the colour, its place around the wheel: yellow, red-violet, blue-green. Value is how light or dark it is, the one thing a black-and-white photograph keeps. Chroma is how intense it is, from grey to as vivid as the colour can be.
Every hue is most vivid at its own value. Yellow reaches full intensity only when it is light; violet only when it is dark. That is why the painter's wheel is lighter at the top than at the bottom, and why a pale violet or a dark yellow always looks a little greyed. Untick natural value and move the value slider to see it happen.
The painter's wheel is arranged the way pigments behave, with red opposite green, yellow opposite violet and blue opposite orange. The light wheel follows the physics of the screen, where red sits opposite cyan. Use the painter's wheel for the brush and the light wheel for a web page; the Physics of Colour explains why the two differ.
A harmony is a decision about what to leave out.
Colour is something we practise slowly and deliberately at GoldBrush Academy.
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