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Techniques & Color: fun facts and quiz
The essentials in 7 ideas, with fun facts, an illustrated story and a quiz to see how much you know.
The essentials
The Colour Wheel
The colour wheel arranges colours in a circle. In painting, red, yellow and blue are the traditional primaries; mixing them gives orange, green and purple.
Key fact
Isaac Newton drew one of the first colour wheels, in 1704.
Complementary Colours
Complementary colours sit opposite each other on the wheel, like red and green or blue and orange. Side by side, they make each other pop.
Key fact
Film posters often pair orange and teal for this reason.
Warm & Cool Colours
Reds, oranges and yellows feel warm and seem to come forward; blues and greens feel cool and seem to recede. Artists use this to create mood and depth.
Key fact
Picasso’s “Blue Period” used cool blues to express sadness.
Linear Perspective
Linear perspective makes flat pictures look deep: parallel lines, like railway tracks, meet at a vanishing point, and faraway things are drawn smaller.
Key fact
Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated it in Florence around 1415.
Light & Shadow
Chiaroscuro means strong contrast between light and dark. Painters like Caravaggio used it to make figures leap out of dark backgrounds.
Key fact
“Chiaroscuro” is Italian for “light-dark”.
Paints Through Time
Artists have used many paints: fresco on wet plaster, egg tempera, slow-drying oils, and fast-drying acrylics, invented in the 20th century.
Key fact
Ultramarine blue was once made from ground lapis lazuli, worth more than gold.
Pointillism
Pointillist painters like Georges Seurat built pictures from tiny dots of pure colour. Up close you see dots; from a distance, your eye blends them.
Key fact
Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” took him about two years.
Fun facts
Newton named seven colours in the rainbow, adding indigo, partly to match the seven notes of a musical scale.
Stare at a red dot for 30 seconds, then look at a white wall: you’ll see a green afterimage.
Distant hills look bluish through the air, which is why painters use cool colours to push things into the background.
Brunelleschi showed off perspective with a painting, a peephole and a mirror, held up in front of the real building.
Georges de La Tour painted scenes lit by a single candle flame, hidden behind a hand or an object.
Some ancient Egyptian paintings still hold their colour after more than 3,000 years.
La Grande Jatte is about 3 metres wide, and every bit of it is built from small dabs of colour.
Story: Mummy Brown
Mummy Brown
From the 1500s to the 1800s, one popular brown paint had a grim secret ingredient: ground-up Egyptian mummies.
“Mummy brown” was prized for shadows and skin tones. Many artists had no idea what was in the tube.
When painter Edward Burne-Jones found out, in 1881, he was so shocked that, so the story goes, he gave his tube a proper burial in the garden.
True or false?
Tap your answer to see if you got it, and why.
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Question 1 of 10
Mixing blue and yellow paint makes green.
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True. Green is a secondary colour: blue plus yellow.
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Question 2 of 10
Complementary colours create strong contrast side by side.
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True. Each makes the other look brighter.
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Question 3 of 10
Blue is usually seen as a cool colour.
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True. Like water and shadow.
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Question 4 of 10
In perspective, parallel lines can meet at a vanishing point.
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True. Like railway tracks meeting on the horizon.
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Question 5 of 10
Caravaggio was known for dramatic light and dark.
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True. His figures glow out of deep shadow.
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Question 6 of 10
Acrylic paint is a 20th-century invention.
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True. It became widely available in the 1950s.
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Question 7 of 10
Pointillism uses small dots of colour.
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True. Thousands of them.
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Question 8 of 10
Orange is a primary colour in painting.
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False. It’s a secondary: red plus yellow.
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Question 9 of 10
The same pair is complementary in every colour system.
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False. Paint and screen light pair colours differently.
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Question 10 of 10
Warm colours seem to move away from the viewer.
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False. They seem to come forward.
Keep going in the app
KnowSoda learns what you know and brings back what you’re about to forget. Techniques & Color has 6 more ideas at the Advanced and Expert levels.
Sources
- Isaac Newton (1704), Opticks, and the first colour wheel
- National Gallery (London) — Glossary: chiaroscuro, perspective, pointillism
- Tate — Art terms
- The Art Institute of Chicago — A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
- National Gallery (London) — Holbein’s The Ambassadors
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — sfumato, impasto, Prussian blue, golden ratio
- Surrey NanoSystems — Vantablack
