Color Theory Glossary

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Color properties

Chroma

How far a color is from a neutral gray of the same value — its colorfulness or purity.

All 57 definitions, A–Z

Accent: A small area of contrasting color — often high in chroma or complementary to the dominant hue — that draws the eye. Accents work because they are rare: a red boat in a gray-green harbor. Repeat the accent color too often and it stops being one.
Additive color: Color made by mixing light. Red, green and blue light combine toward white: red plus green light makes yellow, green plus blue makes cyan, red plus blue makes magenta. Screens, projectors and stage lighting work this way, which is why a digital color picker behaves so differently from paint.
Analogous colors: Three to five hues that sit next to each other on the wheel, such as yellow, yellow-orange and orange. Analogous schemes feel calm and unified; they work best when one hue dominates and the value range does the dramatic work.
Bezold effect: A color looks different depending on the color of fine lines or small shapes around it — and unlike simultaneous contrast, it shifts toward its surroundings. Red with thin white lines looks lighter than the same red with black lines. It is named after Wilhelm von Bezold, a 19th-century scientist who reportedly noticed it in rug designs.
Broken color: Color applied in separate, unblended strokes or patches so several hues stay visible up close and merge at a distance, as in much Impressionist painting. Older texts also use “broken” for a color dulled by mixing in its complement.
Chroma: How far a color is from a neutral gray of the same value — its colorfulness or purity. A fire-engine red has high chroma; a brick red of the same lightness has lower chroma. The highest possible chroma differs by hue and value: yellows reach their strongest chroma when light, while blues and violets peak at darker values.
Chromatic black: A dark mixed from colors instead of a tube black — for example ultramarine with burnt umber, or phthalo green with a deep crimson. Chromatic blacks can be nudged warm or cool and reveal their hue when lightened, so they sit more naturally in a colorful painting.
Chromatic gray: A gray mixed from colors — usually a pair of complements, or three primaries — instead of black and white. It keeps a faint warm or cool lean, so it harmonizes with the palette it came from. Ultramarine, burnt sienna and white is a classic recipe.
CIELAB & LCh: A color space defined by the CIE in 1976 to approximate human perception. L* is lightness from 0 to 100, a* runs green to red and b* blue to yellow; LCh describes the same space as lightness, chroma and hue angle. Equal steps in L* look roughly equal, which makes it useful for value scales and for measuring color difference (ΔE).
CMYK: The four process inks of color printing: cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black). Black is added because the three colored inks together give a muddy dark brown rather than a true black, and it saves ink on text. Preview artwork in CMYK before printing to see which vivid colors will shift.
Color bias: The direction a paint leans away from a pure hue. Cadmium red light leans orange and quinacridone rose leans blue; ultramarine leans violet and phthalo blue leans green. Mix two colors that lean toward each other and you get clean secondaries; mix colors that lean away and the result is duller, because a little of the third primary sneaks in.
Color constancy: The brain’s habit of seeing an object’s color as stable under different lighting. A white page looks white under warm lamplight and in blue shade, even though the light reaching your eye differs a lot. Useful in daily life, it is a painter’s trap: to paint light you have to see past it to the color that is actually there.
Color harmony: An arrangement of colors that feels unified and intentional. Wheel schemes are starting points, not guarantees: harmony comes as much from controlling value, chroma and the size of each color area as from choosing hues. A shared mother color, a dominant temperature or a limited palette all build harmony.
Color temperature (warm & cool): The sense that a color leans warm (toward red, orange, yellow) or cool (toward blue, green, violet). Temperature is relative: lemon yellow is cool next to cadmium yellow, and a violet-leaning red is cool next to an orange-leaning one. Warm colors tend to advance and cool ones recede, and shifting temperature models form without changing value.
Color temperature of light (kelvin): The color of a light source, measured in kelvin. Candlelight is about 1,900 K, warm-white household bulbs about 2,700 K and daylight roughly 5,000–6,500 K. Confusingly, higher kelvin numbers look bluer — the opposite of the painter’s warm and cool. Paint under light close to the one the work will be seen in.
Color wheel: A circle of hues in spectral order that shows relationships at a glance. Isaac Newton published one of the first in Opticks (1704). Painters traditionally use a red–yellow–blue wheel; screens use a red–green–blue one. The two place hues differently, so complements on one are not exactly complements on the other.
Complementary colors: Hues opposite each other on the wheel. Side by side they intensify each other; mixed together they neutralize toward gray or brown. On the painter’s wheel the pairs are red–green, yellow–violet and blue–orange; on a screen’s RGB wheel they are red–cyan, green–magenta and blue–yellow.
Contrast of extension: Johannes Itten’s term for balancing colors by area. Using Goethe’s light values — yellow 9, orange 8, red 6, green 6, blue 4, violet 3 — strong colors need less area to balance weaker ones: about 1 part yellow to 3 parts violet, 1 orange to 2 blue, and red and green in equal amounts.
Dominance: Letting one hue, temperature, value or chroma clearly take the largest share of a picture so the rest play supporting roles. Equal amounts of competing colors tend to look indecisive; a dominant color gives the eye a home key.
Earth colors: Pigments based on iron oxides and clays — yellow ochre, raw and burnt sienna, raw and burnt umber, red oxides — plus their synthetic “Mars” versions. They are lightfast, inexpensive and naturally low in chroma, which makes them harmonize easily.
Equiluminance: Two colors of different hue but the same luminance. Their shared edge can seem to shimmer, and shapes drawn this way are hard to place in space, because the brain’s depth and motion systems rely on brightness differences. The sun in Monet’s Impression, Sunrise is a famous case: in a grayscale copy it nearly vanishes.
Gamut: The full range of colors a device, medium or palette can produce. A screen’s sRGB gamut differs from a printer’s CMYK gamut, so some vivid screen colors can’t be printed. A palette has a gamut too: plot your tube colors on a wheel and the shape they enclose is roughly what you can mix — the idea behind James Gurney’s gamut masking.
Glazing: Laying a thin, transparent film of paint over a dry layer. The glaze tints everything beneath it like colored glass, changing hue and value while letting the underpainting show. Oil glazes are paint thinned with an oil-based medium, acrylic glazes use a glazing medium, and watercolor washes are glazes by nature.
High key: A picture composed mainly of light values, roughly the upper half of the value scale, with few or no true darks. High key reads airy, soft or sunlit — fog, beaches, snow, pale florals. The darkest accents carry extra weight because there are so few of them.
Hue: The attribute that names a color family: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet and everything between. Hue is a color’s position around the color wheel; digital tools measure it in degrees, with red at 0°, green at 120° and blue at 240°. Two colors can share a hue and still look very different if their value or chroma differ — navy and sky blue, for instance.
Intensity: A painter’s word for how bright or dull a color is — its strength rather than its lightness. Pure cadmium orange is high in intensity; the same orange knocked back with a touch of blue is lower. Many teachers use intensity, chroma and saturation interchangeably. Lowering intensity with the complement, rather than with gray or black, keeps a color lively.
Key: The overall range of values in a picture. A high-key painting lives in the light end of the scale, a low-key one in the dark end, and a full-range painting uses everything from near-black to near-white. Choosing a key early sets the mood before any hue is chosen. Some painters also speak of a “color key”, the dominant hue or temperature.
Limited palette: Painting with only a few tube colors. Restriction forces you to mix, keeps colors related and teaches value. The so-called Zorn palette — yellow ochre, a red such as vermilion or cadmium red, ivory black and white — is a famous example, with black acting as a cool blue in mixtures.
Local color: The actual color of an object under even, neutral light: a lemon is yellow, a leaf is green. What you see in a scene is local color changed by the color of the light, by shadow, reflected light and atmosphere. Painting only local color tends to look flat; painting how light alters it creates form.
Low key: A picture built mainly from dark values, with lights kept small and precious. Low key creates mood, drama or night — candlelit interiors and nocturnes. Whistler’s Nocturne paintings are well-known examples.
Masstone: The color of a paint applied thickly, straight from the tube, so no ground shows through. Dark, transparent pigments look very different in masstone: phthalo blue is a near-black blue at full strength. Compare it with the undertone.
Metamerism: When two colors match under one light but not under another, because they reflect different mixtures of wavelengths. A touch-up mixed under warm studio bulbs can match perfectly at night and show as a patch in daylight. Check critical matches under the light where the work will hang.
Monochromatic: A scheme built from one hue in many values and chromas — its tints, shades and tones. Monochrome studies are a good way to practice value, because hue can’t rescue a weak design.
Mother color: One color added in small amounts to every mixture in a painting so that all the colors share a common thread. A touch of ultramarine or burnt sienna in each mix pulls a painting together, much as a single colored light would.
Mud: A mixture that has lost its clarity — dull, chalky or murky in a way you didn’t intend. Common causes are mixing too many pigments, overmixing complements, adding black and white to the same pile, or working wet into wet until everything converges. Most clean mixes need only two or three pigments.
Munsell system: A color system devised by the painter and teacher Albert H. Munsell in the early 1900s. It describes a color by hue, value and chroma, written like 5R 4/14 — a strong red at value 4, chroma 14. Its steps were designed to look visually even, which makes it a favorite for teaching value and chroma.
Neutral: A color with no noticeable hue: black, white and the grays between. Painters also call low-chroma browns, beiges and grays “neutrals” or “near-neutrals”. Neutrals give the eye somewhere to rest and make the strong colors beside them look stronger.
Optical mixing: Small marks of different colors placed side by side blend in the eye at a distance. The eye averages the light from each mark, so an optical mix is close to the average of the colors rather than a paint mixture: blue and yellow dots read as a muted gray, not the green a palette mix gives. Seurat and Signac built pointillism on it, and halftone printing relies on it.
Primary colors: A small set of colors from which others can be mixed. There is no single true set: light uses red, green and blue; printing inks use cyan, magenta and yellow; the painting tradition uses red, yellow and blue. No three real pigments mix every color — each set covers a limited gamut.
RGB: The red, green and blue model used by screens. In 8-bit color each channel runs from 0 to 255 and is often written as a HEX code — #FF0000 is pure red. Most images on the web are in the sRGB color space, and the same numbers can look different on uncalibrated monitors.
RYB: The traditional painter’s model with red, yellow and blue as primaries, behind Itten’s 12-hue wheel and most art-school color wheels. It predicts paint mixing intuitively but not precisely: a magenta-leaning red, a cyan-leaning blue and a lemon yellow mix a wider range than a true red, yellow and blue.
Saturation: Colorfulness judged relative to a color’s own brightness. In studio talk it is often used as a synonym for chroma. In software it is the S in HSL and HSV, a 0–100% slider — but 100% saturation in yellow and in blue gives colors of very different value, so the number alone doesn’t tell you how a color will read in a painting.
Scumbling: Dragging a thin, broken, semi-opaque layer — usually lighter than what lies beneath — over a dry passage so the underlayer peeks through. Scumbles soften edges, suggest atmosphere, and cool or gray a passage without repainting it.
Secondary & tertiary colors: On the painter’s wheel a secondary is a mix of two primaries — orange, green and violet — and a tertiary is a primary mixed with a neighboring secondary, such as red-orange or blue-green. Together they make the familiar 12-step wheel.
Shade: A color mixed with black. Shades are darker and duller, and black can shift the hue: yellow plus black turns olive green rather than dark yellow. Many painters darken with a deeper related color or the complement instead, which keeps more life in the shadows.
Simultaneous contrast: The way neighboring colors change each other’s appearance. A gray looks greenish next to red and pinkish next to green; the same mid-gray looks lighter on black than on white. The chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul described the effect in 1839, after studying why some dyed colors at the Gobelins tapestry works looked dull.
Split-complementary: A hue plus the two hues on either side of its complement — blue with yellow-orange and red-orange, for example. You keep much of the punch of a complementary pair with less tension, which makes it one of the easiest schemes to use well.
Subtractive color: Color made by colorants that absorb, or subtract, parts of the light. Cyan, magenta and yellow inks combine toward black, each layer removing more light. Paint follows the same principle, but real pigments also scatter light, so paint mixing is messier than any simple formula.
Successive contrast (afterimage): After you stare at a strong color, a neutral surface briefly looks tinted with its complement. The eye’s receptors adapt to the stimulus, so when it disappears the opposite response dominates. It is why a mix judged right after staring at a red passage can look greener than it is.
Tetradic (double complementary): Two complementary pairs used together, either as a rectangle on the wheel or as a square of four evenly spaced hues. Tetradic schemes offer the widest range of hue and are the hardest to balance — pick one dominant hue and keep the rest supporting.
Tint: A color mixed with white. Tints are lighter and usually lower in chroma than the original. White also cools many colors: cadmium red plus white gives a cool pink rather than a light red, so painters often add a little warm yellow or orange to keep a tint warm.
Tinting strength: How strongly a paint influences a mixture. A speck of phthalo blue can overpower a pile of white, while yellow ochre needs a generous amount to show. Add strong colors to weaker ones a little at a time, never the other way round.
Tone: A color mixed with gray, or with both black and white, so its chroma drops more than its value changes. Tones are the quiet, grayed colors that make up most of what we see in nature. Many artists also say “tone” when they mean value, as in a tonal study.
Transparency & opacity: How much a paint film hides what is beneath it. Titanium white, the cadmiums and cerulean cover well; phthalos, quinacridones and ultramarine let light pass through to the ground. Many makers print a small square on the label — empty for transparent, filled for opaque.
Triadic colors: Three hues evenly spaced around the wheel, 120° apart — red, yellow and blue, or orange, green and violet. Triads are lively and balanced; let one hue dominate and lower the chroma of the others to avoid a poster look.
Undertone: The color a paint shows when spread thinly over white, or mixed with white. It can lean differently from the masstone — a dark red may look neutral in mass and turn noticeably pink or blue in a thin film. Undertone predicts how a paint behaves in glazes and tints.
Value: How light or dark a color is, regardless of its hue. Munsell’s value scale runs from 0 (black) to 10 (white). Value carries most of the structure of a picture: if the values are right, a painting reads even in black and white. Squinting, or viewing a photo in grayscale, hides hue and chroma so you can judge value alone.