Design 911: The Impact of Color

By Andrea Melione
This article originally appeared in ArtTrader Magazine, Spring 2009 Issue 6

The impact of color is tremendous: Not only does color have an emotional impact, it also has an impact on your design and the composition of your artwork, be it an ATC or a large mural! Color has the power to attract the eye, take attention away from an element in your work, move the eye around the composition, and make the artwork more exciting to look at. In this issue, we’re going to look at how to use this power to enhance the design of our personal artwork.

To Draw Attention Around an Image

Color is a powerful tool to move the viewer’s eye through a piece of artwork. You can easily guide the viewer though your composition, using color.

This postcard has a lot going on. Though there appears to be an explosion of color, the color is in fact carefully controlled. The text “Peace for All’ is a very light green, and green, of course, contains yellow. None of the other areas of color within the image contain yellow; they are either purple (red and blue) or blue. In addition, the light green is also the lightest color in the composition, adding the very important element of contrast. The light green word “Peace” seems to drip down through the rest of the lettering, and on down around the left hand, leading the viewer’s eye completely through the image.

To Draw Attention Away

You can actually use color to draw attention away from something in your art (such as a mistake!) Use a neutral color for the area you wish to draw attention from, and use brighter, more intense color (this is called saturation) in an area away from the neutral colors. Let’s look at the Peace postcard once more: You will see that the hands are a neutral color. Skin color can be any color; red, yellow, black, brown etc. But the hands for this image were specifically colored a neutral tan/gray so as not to compete with the round Earth! Because a neutral color can so easily fade into the background, the hands are outlined in fuchsia, so as to remain visible to the eye. Fuchsia was carefully chosen, though, so it would remain cohesive with the rest of the purple/blue elements in the design.

To Draw Attention To

The same principle applies here. If you wish to draw attention to a face, or to text, use color to draw the eye.

This postcard has a really difficult composition: The text and collaged hand are almost competing with the cupcake because they take up about the same amount of space in the postcard. However, you can use color to save an iffy composition such as this. Notice that that hand/text area and the background all are fuchsias, blues and purples. All of these colors have some amount of blue in them, and are considered ‘cool’ in temperature. In order to draw the eye toward the cupcake, I used warm colors, colors that would contain some amount of yellow. The green surrounding the cupcake contain yellow (yellow + blue = green), and I shaded the pink frosting with orange (yellow + red = orange) to warm it up! The cherry girl’s skirt is green and yellow, and the cake portion of the cupcake is a warm brown (which also contains yellow.) I left the collaged ‘pointing hand’ a neutral gray so as not to stand out more than it already does; the gray is tied into the color composition by the silver I used around the border of the card.

Contrast with Color

Contrast is simply a way to enhance the visual quality of an artwork and make it look more interesting. Think of cartoons in your newspaper: The ones that grab your attention the quickest are not the ones that feature simple line drawings, but the ones that feature a use of strong areas of black, or ones that use ‘half tones’ which are grays for shading. Color can be used for the same eye-catching effect.

Thus, tonal value (the scale from light to dark) is very important, even with color, which also has a value of light to dark. Instead of creating a collage or painting with medium blues and medium purples, shake it up a bit by varying the light or darkness of the blues or purples. For example, if you are creating a color wash over your collage, vary how much paint you mix with the water: A lot of water will give a light colored wash, and less water and more paint will give a more intense colored wash.

One thing that can be good to avoid is muddy color and color of all the same value, or color that does not match the mood you are trying to convey. Is your work cheerful? Avoid muddy colors! Muddy color is created when you mix too many colors together, such as mixing purple and yellow, or red, blue and yellow together.

Muddy colors, or neutrals can actually convey a mood very well (such as contemplation, or fear) if you know how to use them, but contrast is still important! This card here has a distinct brown/red/neutral scheme but contrast is created with the use of white.

Collage or other media is no different; make sure your work has contrast, with lights and darks. And be careful where you place them: The whitest whites and the blackest blacks should not be added randomly (such in a collage or abstract) but placed with a composition in mind! For more ideas about composition of elements (rather than color), read the Design 911 column in issue four of ArtTrader Mag.

Color is a crucial component of your design; try to make intentional decisions on how you use color, keeping some of the above tips in mind. In the next issue, I’ll be discussing how to create a cohesive composition through Gestalt Theory! (Trust me, it’s much less complicated than it sounds!)

Color Composition Tip:

• Before adding color to your artwork, take a sheet of scratch paper and test the color you want to use first. Some shades of color work better together than others. If you do not have experience in color theory, it is a good idea to plan color first. As you gain experience, you will gradually learn to use color intuitively; but in the beginning it is best to make decisions based on experimentation, rather than random choices!