Color Theory: Balancing Colors

Video Transcript

"There are lots of times where you need to be able to balance colors. And, the kind of exercise I suggest sounds a little bit tedious, but, believe me, it's worth every minute you put into it. Because the more control you have over your colors, the better you're going to be as a painter. Excuse me. So, I brought this in to show you, this is an old color study of mine, but, this was all about balancing values of different colors, and balancing saturations of different colors. How to move from one to the other, without really telling that you did it. And, obviously we are moving from a light color here, to a dark color here, but in the middle, you can't really tell what's going, you know, it's hard to know what's what, because I have balanced this sort of light, this sort of purpley color here with a dark, with a bluer. There's a red-purple here, a blue-purple here, as the same value, they, it's easier to blend. So, if you want a good blend, you may have, you, and you want to change color, you need to match the value. So, you know, here we were with my value study, and what I wanted to try to do was get all these top values to feel like they're the same. This one still feels dark to me, you know. So, what can I do to match to that? I'm going to go back to my palette, and see if I can get a closer match. And, see if this, I'm going to put this right next to it. And, you have to wait a couple minutes for it to dry, to see if it worked. I'm going to put that against these two. And see if it got too light, or if it's the same. Again, the reason is, you can do, you get, the more you can control your colors, the more possible variations you have. And, that's what you want to try to achieve."