Colour Theory Terms Every Artist Should Know
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Colour theory has its own language and if you've ever picked up a book about colour or watched a painting tutorial and found yourself lost in unfamiliar terms, you're not alone. You'll hear words like chroma and prismatic, used a lot in relation to colour, and it's not always obvious what they actually mean in practice.
This is a plain-language reference for the terms that come up most often in painting and collage in relation to colour. Bookmark it so you can come back to it, and let it sit alongside my other colour theory posts:
Four Colour Harmony PrinciplesÂ
| The Glossary
Admixture: A colour added to another primarily to darken it or shift its temperature, rather than to mix a new colour outright. An admixture is different from mixing two colours together in equal measure, it's a restrained tonal adjustment rather than a full colour blend.
Analogous colours: Colours that sit directly beside each other on the colour wheel, sharing a common base hue.
Chroma: Another word for the intensity or purity of a colour. High chroma means vivid and saturated; low chroma means muted or greyish. Often used interchangeably with 'saturation'.
Colour interaction: The way colours influence and react to one another when placed side by side. No colour exists in isolation; a warm red will read differently against a dark background than against a light one, and a neutral grey can appear to shift cool or warm depending on what surrounds it.
Colour temperature: The perceived warmth or coolness of a colour. Reds, oranges, and yellows read as warm; blues, greens, and violets read as cool. Temperature is relative — a blue can appear warmer or cooler depending on what surrounds it (colour interaction).
Colour wheel: A circular diagram that maps the relationships between colours. The standard artist's colour wheel is built around three primary colours (red, yellow, blue), from which all other colours are mixed. Most colour harmony principles are simply different ways of selecting colours from around the wheel.
Complementary colours: Colours positioned directly opposite each other on the colour wheel. Every colour has only one true complement.
Diad: A two-colour harmony made up of colours separated by one colour on the wheel.
Double complementary: A four-colour harmony made up of two sets of complementary pairs.
Hue: The name of a colour in its purest form: red, yellow, blue, orange, and so on. When artists talk about "hue," they mean the colour itself, before any lightening, darkening, or neutralising.
Monochromatic: A palette built from a single hue, using tints, shades, and tones of that colour only.
Neutral: A colour with very low saturation: whites, greys, blacks, and earthy browns. Neutrals aren't the absence of colour, they're pure colour at it's most desaturated.
Primary colour: Red, yellow, and blue; the three colours from which (in traditional colour theory) all other colours can be mixed. They cannot themselves be created by mixing other colours together.
Prismatic colour: A colour in its purest, most saturated form, unmixed and unmodified. Sometimes called a pure colour.
Saturation: How vivid or intense a colour is. A fully saturated colour is at its brightest and purest. As saturation decreases, a colour moves toward grey.
Secondary colours: The colours produced by mixing two primaries: orange (red + yellow), green (yellow + blue), and violet (blue + red).
Shade: A colour darkened by the addition of black or a dark admixture.
Split-complementary: A three-colour harmony that uses one colour paired with the two colours on either side of its direct complement. It softens the strong contrast of a straight complementary pair while still creating visual interest.
Tertiary colours: The colours produced by mixing a primary and an adjacent secondary: red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet, and red-violet.
Tint: A colour lightened by the addition of white.
Tone: A colour modified by the addition of grey, which reduces its saturation without dramatically lightening or darkening it.
Triadic harmony: A three-colour harmony using hues equally spaced around the colour wheel.
Value: The lightness or darkness of a colour, independent of its hue. A strong range of values, from light to dark, gives a painting or collage its sense of depth and contrast. Value is often more important to the structure of a piece than colour itself.
Colour theory is a creative language worth learning, not so you can follow rules, but so you can make more intentional choices, and understand why something is or isn't working when you're in the middle of making it. The more fluent you become, the more freely and intuitively you can work. Rules are there to be broken after all!
