Yesterday someone asked me if I enjoyed teaching classes back in the day.
I definitely did, but I would have rather just stuck to making art. I was a art hoe, and I got some serious cash from those classes.
It was the 90s, and I got a majority of the class fee, often raking in up to 6k in a single day if they advertised it well. I’d do two classes to get that. A basic color theory class and a advanced one. Each was around three to four hours, but would usually run over.
To do the advanced, I required you’d have done the regular one, or had legit arts education of some sort, or had a really good reason why you didn’t need the basics, and with a explanation of what color theory was, why it was important, and how you (the person) utilized it.
When I’d started the classes, it was just one class, but people would sign up thinking it was a color mixing class. They had no clue what color theory was, or it’s importance. They simply signed up to learn how to mix their own colors.
These were usually experienced artists. Usually self taught or with diplomas from art institutes and the like.
It blew my mind how they were so ignorant of color.
I eventually created the two tier system to not waste time, and in the basic class did spend a good hour on mixing pigments of various types so they got what they wanted.
Nonetheless, I was annoyed because I had ZERO interest in talking about the basics of color mixing to people who considered themselves “artists” of a professional level.
It was my own shortcomings playing out.
The Curse of Knowledge: A cognitive bias that occurs when you are communicating with others and you unknowingly assume they have the background and depth of knowledge to understand you. These were working artists, not hobbyists. I assumed they must be semi knowledgeable on the topic.
I was obsessed with color theory from a young age. All aspects of it. I assumed my role was to take artists with understanding of it to the highest level.
False Consensus Bias: The tendency to overestimate how much other people share your beliefs, values, attitudes, and interests. It causes a person to view their own preferences as the standard or “normal” default, making anyone else’s lack of interest seem unusual or annoying.
As a color obsessed artist, it dumbfounded me that not all other artists were as interested as I was.
I was young, I was getting a lot of praise, my work being showcased in many publications, winning a lot of awards, etc. It had maybe gone to my head, and it had pushed me into a group of peers that were ahead of the curve. Basically a bunch of other obsessive artists who though a 14 hour work day was laziness, and who lived, and breathed art seven days a week when not partying to excess. I was out of touch with the reality of most artists who actually had a better work/life balance than I. Still, I was annoyed.
So… what is color mixing?
It is the practical, hands-on technique of blending physical paints, inks, crayons, etc. to manufacture a target shade. Teaching it deals with real-world variables like pigment quality, color bias (warm/cool variants of a primary), opacity, and tinting strength (such as adding white for tints or black/complementary colors for shades and desaturation) Teaching the basics takes about 20 minutes, and advanced knowledge is all about physical limitations of your palette, such as why mixing two specific tubes of “blue” and “yellow” might yield a dull green rather than a vibrant one due to individual pigment chemistry. Teaching time about two or three hours. The rest is just practice. Lots of practice, but still, just practice. Easy Cheesy, and once you get it you can mix amazing with anything after just a couple minutes of experimentation with the product. It is a simple learnable craft.
Color theory is where the magic happens.
Color theory is the unending study of why and how, built on a growing body of knowledge and visual science explaining how colors work together, how the eye perceives them, and how they elicit emotional or spatial responses.
What Color theory Is For…
The basics:
- Emotional Communication: Colors evoke psychological responses (e.g., blues can feel somber or calm; reds can signal danger or passion).
- Visual Organization: It helps the artist direct the viewer’s eye, create structure, and establish an immediate mood or atmosphere.
- Aesthetic Harmony: It provides formulas to ensure a piece looks balanced, cohesive, and intentional rather than chaotic.
Blah blah blah… what it really is about is setting the scene, making people feel a thing, think a thing, etc. without depending exclusively on your illustration or whatever else.
Color psychology and atmosphere can dictate how a viewer instantly feels before they even process the subject matter of an image. Color bypasses logic, triggering immediate biological and cultural responses that set the emotional tone of a piece.
Simple Examples: Warm Palettes (Reds, Oranges, Yellows): Can create an atmosphere of intimacy, comfort, heat, or high stakes or emergency. A landscape in warm tones feels like a sweltering day or a cozy, sunlit autumn afternoon. Cool Palettes (Blues, Greens, Purples): Can create an atmosphere of isolation, quiet, mystery, or remorse or hostility. The same landscape as mentioned above in cool tones instantly becomes a cold winter night or a lonely place to reminisce about your mistakes of the past.
Value Contrasts (Light vs. Dark)
- High Contrast (Chiaroscuro): Extreme differences between dark shadows and bright lights create an atmosphere of high drama, tension, secrets, and intense focus. You’ll see me use this in a lot of stuff.
- Low Contrast (High Key / Low Key):
- High Key (Mostly light values): Airy, optimistic, dreamlike, or peaceful.
- Low Key (Mostly dark values): Melancholic, oppressive, ominous, or intimate.
– I blend these and create harmonies or juxtapose them to intentionally fool the viewers sense pretty often.
Saturation (Intensity)
- Vibrant, High Saturation: Creates an atmosphere of fantasy, childlike wonder, intense energy, or surrealism. This is my playground. I play with pop surrealism, and I often paint in a high contrast expressive manner to bring people a vision of the unreal. I utilize this along with exaggerated elements in my basic designs and in the illustration concepts of my paintings to leave reality, but… then again you will note I often mix this with low saturation backgrounds or secondary subjects in my paintings to tie that fantasy and dreamlike vision in the real world.
- Muted, Low Saturation: Creates an atmosphere of grit, realism, nostalgia, or depression. Desaturating colors grounds an image in somber, everyday reality. I used to call this “Face in the dirt” because it kept me from going to far… always add a bit of face in the dirt I’d say to myself.
Another of my go to places is the “Muted Complementary” Mood: Keeping large areas of a painting, tattoo, illustration, or whatever in muted, low-saturation blue-grays for example and then slamming in some vibrant heat hits the mark. Dull gray with a single splash of a highly saturated hot orange for example will pop almost violently. This instantly tells the viewer’s brain that the hot zone is good. For example, a bright orange California poppy in a dry warm field is just a poppy, but that same poppy in the midst of murky gray blue gunky mud will instantly make you the viewer think of hope, winning, rising above, etc.
Discordant Colors:
Ah, that feeling of insanity. Using colors that intentionally clash or break harmony rules (like a bright lime green next to a murky magenta) creates an atmosphere of psychological insanity, discomfort, horror, or confusion.
I could go on for hours, even days… but this is already getting long for a blog post. Just note that all I have mentioned above, plus much more not mentioned, all are tools to be used together if mastered. If not mastered you can easily just make crap. In that aspect, it is much like color mixing. You can mix Red, Yellow, and Blue to make a flesh tone. You can mix Red, Yellow, and Blue to get a beautiful Leaf Green. You can mix Red, Yellow, and Blue to get most anything, but if you mix them wrong you always get shit muggly browns. You don’t want that.
So, I got you to click into my post about Color Theory Classes that distressed me in the 90s, and sneaky like gave you a primer on what color theory is vs color mixing. I should note that HOW you do your color mixing falls into the toolbox of color theory, so they are siblings, but definitely not the same things. I didn’t talk much about the color theory classes that distressed me in the 90s I guess, so maybe another time, but maybe not… I don’t miss them, though I do miss the money, and I also miss knowing I helped a fellow artist expand their knowledge base and grow. Oh well, that was yesterday. Today I am a misanthropic hermit artist working in his private studio with stone age views about what art is and how it should be created. I fear my kind will fade from the earth, so… if you are a artist, or a wanna be artist, throw away your iPads, don’t trace stuff or just print it out, learn to draw freehand, learn to use your ink, your paints, your pastels, and do it until the ai robots are copying you instead of you copying them. It is possible. I have been making my living as an artist since the 80s. I have sold many hundreds of paintings over the years, thousands of drawings, plus a ton of other weird things like painted cow skulls, airbrushed appliances, and even custom painted suitcases. Nobody needs me for commercial illustration anymore I suppose, the machines took over, but still… I have done what I loved my whole adult life. You can too. Want to stand out? Ditch the iPads and ai. Use your imagination, be brave enough to suck while you learn, because only those who are brave enough to do it will achieve the magic. Educate yourself on art techniques and previous art movements.
If in doubt… put your 40 hours a week in, and remember the law of attrition in regard to artists. It is real. The vast majority of aspiring artists will eventually drop out, burn out, or shift careers due to financial and institutional barriers. Stick and you will succeed if you constantly practice and learn.
Guess I drifted from the theme of color theory classes that distressed me in the 90s, but if you were reading that, you probably should have read the last bit too.
Now, go buy some of my art.