Tip: Building Harmonious Color

Howard Lyon posted a wonderful article on color harmony. His premise is that harmony is driven primarily by the temperature of the light that illuminates the scene. And to ensure a harmonious palette, an artist must adjust the colors to reflect the shared light.

He shares the following illustration to show how the same scene appears under different lighting conditions. It show how colors must work together to reflect the different lights that are cast. For example, Lyon notes that the lace collar reads as white regardless of how the scene is tinted. He says that "our brain can tell that the light in the scene has changed and adjusts to accept the tinted cloth as white."

To make the point more strongly he provides the side-by-side comparison of skin tones below. The skin color varies from a soft tan to a strong lavender color to reflect the changed light (perhaps altered by the time of day the artist is trying to depict).

He concludes by stating:

"It is the same in the natural world. If we are wearing a white shirt and we step outside into a beautiful Arizona sunset, we don’t wonder why our shirt just turned peach, we know that the temperature of the light changed and so the whole spectrum shifted with it. If we had a shirt that could somehow retain it’s brilliant white under different colors of light, it would stand out as unnatural. It is the same with our skin. Throughout the average day outside, our skin changes color significantly, as the color of light changes from dawn, noon and dusk. What does this tell us? Perceived color is highly relative."

Finally Lyon shows what happens when colors are not equally influenced by the temperature of the shared light. The image on the left is an original painting by William Bougereau. The image on the right has been altered by a blue light. The image in the middle shows the head with original lighting but the rest of the image under blue light. Can you see how the colors of the face are too warm to harmonize with the rest of the image? The colors are not believable because they are not rationalized by the unifying temperature of a shared light source.

James Gurney has a fun article illustrating the same concept. He shows the following shows eight colors and asks what they have in common.

The answer is that they all represent the bright yellow skin of the minion characters in the animated film, Despicable Me. The different shades and tints are caused by variations in lighting. Perhaps you can see the changing colors in the following trailer for Despicable Me 2.