CURRICULUM

7 Visual Elements of Art

Color has three properties: hue, saturation, and value. Color is what you see when light strikes an object and it is reflected back into the eye, and interpreted by the part of your brain that processes colors.

The first of the properties is hue, which what we think of as the main property of color, like red, blue, purple, green, and so on. The second property is value, which defines the lightness or darkness of the visual element of color. The third property is' saturation, which ranges from highly saturated colors to very grayed and neutral colors.

A simple representation of the color visual element is the color wheel. There are several types of color wheel but the easiest one for beginner artists to use is the Triadic color wheel which shows the hue of a color visual element.The first color wheel was developed by Sir Isaac Newton around the start of the 17th century. This color wheel was an arrangement of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet on a rotating disk.

Since the origination of the color wheel by Newton, it has become one of the most powerful tools available to artists for explaining the relationship between colors. The three primary colors are red, blue and yellow. The three secondary colors are green, orange and purple. These are made by mixing two of the primary colors. There are six other tertiary colors. Using the primary colors, you could mix pretty much any color in the spectrum. This is why a solid knowledge of color theory is so important when it comes to painting and mixing your colors. This is also why you should always at the very least have the primary colors on your palette.

As described above, color has three components: hue, saturation, and value. The visual element of value is how light or dark a color is, from white through gray to black.