I'm your itinerant host, Marco Bucci.

Let's roll right into part one, shall we?

Say hello to multiple time pre to West winner Morgan Weisling.

When asked about his color mixing, Morgan said, I don't know what I'm mixing.

The colors on my palette are like a piano and I'm just hitting the keys.

Okay, I appreciate the insight, Morgan, but that doesn't quite help me with this whole color.

Oh, look, it's world renowned watercolor artist Joseph Zabuckvich.

Maybe he can spare some knowledge about color.

He says, I don't look at the colors on my palette.

There's a warm side, a cool side, and a few odds and ends in the middle.

Now maybe it's just me, but that advice sounds like it's coming from people who don't know how to use color, but that's a Morgan Weisling painting and that's a Joseph Zabuckvich painting and the colors in both of them are beautiful.

Today's lesson is about color harmony and color harmony sounds intimidating.

It always struck me as one of those elite color theories that a lowly student like me would never be able to understand.

And there was a kernel of truth in the way Weisling and Zabuckvich talked about color a moment ago in the sense that there's just something indescribable about the effect these colors have together.

But despite that, let's not go any further without having a working definition of color harmony.

Well, we know what color is, so let's look up harmony real quick.

Harmony, the combination of simultaneously sounded musical notes to produce a pleasing effect.

So let's just change that word there and these two words here and that word there.

And there we have it.

Color harmony, the combination of simultaneously displayed colors that produce a pleasing effect.

To achieve color harmony, the first thing we have to do is overcome our limited acquaintance with color.

Everyone chime in now.

What color is this?

Red.

Excellent.

What color is this?

Blue.

Very good.

And this?

Green.

And this? Orange.

Okay, that was tons of fun.

But sadly, understanding colors by their names is actually quite limiting.

And to show that, I'm going to take this gray swatch of color and paint it into this Edgar Payne landscape.

And when I do that, something funny happens.

That gray suddenly looks a little orange.

And when I bump up its value slightly so it fits here, it doesn't resemble orange at all.

And just for reference, that was the same gray.

I just changed the value.

So how does such a minuscule difference in the color picker result in such a massive difference in the painting?

The reason is, grays communicate with each other.

You see, pure saturated colors like this have a very hard time communicating.

They feel more like a loud party where everyone's shouting.

Here's another attempt at that painting, only this time with grayer versions of those colors.

I hope you can agree that this alone is producing a more harmonious effect.

But now I have to explain why that is.

I need to come up with a cool image that everyone's going to remember.

That's it.

We're right in sync with the new Star Wars film.

So let's take the Millennium Falcon.

But not just any Millennium Falcon.

This is the 2017 model with a color wheel on it.

That's awesome.

And I'll need a captain for this example.

So I'll use Jar Jar B- I mean, Han Solo.

Han Solo's job is to make sure that all these colors in the Rebel Alliance are communicating their plans to each other.

As we saw earlier, these colors are all shouting right now.

And you can't command a Rebel ship with that kind of chaos.

So what does Han Solo do?

He brings the colors in closer together so they don't have to shout anymore.

When colors are less saturated like this, they begin to talk to each other.

And as with any conversation, they gain a common ground.

And what is that common ground?

Well, as far as color harmony goes, it's that all the colors are now based on relative degrees of gray.

In this example, the colors are all at the same relative level of gray.

Maybe something like this on our Millennium Falcon.

This is okay, but it doesn't have to be equal like this.

If I now did this and brought in some more saturated colors that are layered over top of those common grays, watch the transition as the saturated colors that were once too loud now carry real weight in this color conversation.

Here's that Joseph Zabuckvich painting again.

And I specifically want to look at this area here.

There's a very subtle conversation between oranges and blues that make up that wall.

Now you might be saying, but Han, how did he pull that off?

Orange and blue are at opposite ends of the color wheel.

Well, he started with an orangish color and probably used the force to bring it into about here.

And keep your eye up here too, as I plot these colors on the actual painting as well.

Anyway, that first color choice you make is actually not that relevant yet.

And that's because it's all alone.

It's not talking to anybody.

So let's invite other colors into the conversation.

One thing you can do is add subtle variations on that color.

This kind of gets the conversation started and it's pretty easy to do.

This is a good start, but you might not want the color to only exist on one side of the color wheel like that.

There's a lot of opportunity to carry the conversation into here.

And in my judgment, he brings in just two more colors to do it.

So watch the color wheel.

This color starts talking to the blues by moving towards them.

And then this color actually completes the journey into the blues.

Now to be sure, those are very gray colors, but this painting proves that our eyes are extremely sensitive to these subtle changes.

Let's now zoom back out and notice one more layer of color harmony.

He's accenting those grays by using very saturated versions of them in the boats below.

I think this is a brilliant move because now those colors are speaking to each other across multiple objects, the entire frame, and uses a wide variety of grays to really fill out the color conversation.

Now let's recall the Morgan Weisling painting.

Although this is painted in a different style and in a different medium, it builds its color harmony in just the same way.

For instance, I'm sure your astute eyes can now detect that some of those bluish grays in the quilt are talking to those reds in the girl's dress.

And looking back at our gray swatches, I think we can now appreciate what was happening here.

The reason two similar grays can look so different is because they're having two different conversations.

The gray in the shadows that looks kind of orange looks that way because it was talking to blues.

The other gray looks almost bluish in its context because it was talking to these colors and well, it was the bluest part of that conversation.

So I think we should give our two friends here a pass on their vague comments about color earlier.

If anything, we should now have more of an appreciation for some of the esoteric imagery that painters tend to invoke when talking about color.

This is one of my paintings that builds its color harmony using the same ideas we just saw in part one.

And I'm going to recreate it now to demonstrate how I go about building these color harmonies from scratch.

Oh, and Han Solo is here too to provide a live update tracking of my palette as I go.

The first thing I noticed is that this all happens in kind of a fluid motion.

It's not like part one where I could break down certain parts of the painting and isolate it.

You'll notice when I paint this, I try and rough out very quickly some grays and some colors across the whole canvas to kind of see what conversations are starting.

And then as a painter, I can sift through them and choose which ones I want to nurture and which ones I don't want at all.

And this is why I'm not showing you the color picker, because as we also saw in part one, the same color can look radically different based on the area of the painting that it's in.

So for that reason, it's way more important to use your eyes and trust your eyes rather than some digital readout.

One of the stronger colors in this painting is that turquoise color.

And you notice what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to carry it from the sky in the background into the monster's head and even into the bridge.

And it kind of gets grayer with each successive step.

So it's my way of doing what Zabuckvich did earlier, carrying a color through the painting.

It kind of reminds me of how musicians can have variations on a theme as a way of tying a piece of music together.

In a painting, it's variations on a certain color passing through various levels of gray.

And what that does is it just has this unifying, harmonizing effect.

Now, this is not a formula because every painting will require different colors, different palettes, different levels of gray.

So this is just a broad concept that might help you really enhance your picture's impact with color.

And I'd just like to reiterate a message from part one.

The reason this painting looks colorful is not because there's a lot of saturated colors in it.

There are some, but what's really happening is I've set the scene with like a murmur of conversation with multiple grays.

And then what I can do based on my own artistic aesthetic is I can choose which of those colors I want to take all the way to like full saturation.

So in this case, I've chosen that turquoise color to be the most saturated color, followed by some of those greens, and then maybe the yellow would be third.

The other colors in the painting, the oranges, the purples, for example, they exist in grayer And of course, when I say that, I mean relative degrees of gray, as we've seen.

And just one last note on process.

I find that starting in color rather than black and white really allows you to embed and build and discover your color harmony as you're also building your shapes and values and edges.

Giving your colors time to play out like that, just like a real conversation, is a great way to find all the nuances and ultimately come out with the strongest possible meaning.

I love color, but if I were asked to make a list of painting fundamentals in order of importance, that list might look something like this.

The big number one, drawing.

You can only paint as well as you can draw.

You can refer to episode four of this series for some insight into drawing good shapes.

Number two, actually, this should be number 1.5, values.

These two things really go hand in hand, and I will do a future episode on values.

Number two is edges, and we talked about those in episode three of this series.

Now you might be like, hey, you didn't leave any room for color.

Well, to me, color fits like this.

And that's because color doesn't carry the same kind of load that drawing values and edges do.

Color is the subjective part of painting that, in my opinion, is best when it's enriching a picture that already works.

And I hope this lesson has given you some concepts to explore in your journeys around the color wheel.

You know, speaking of round, have you guys heard this crazy internet theory that the color wheel isn't actually round, but flat?

I mean, come on, give me a break.

Evidence of a round color wheel is everywhere.

I mean, even industry-leading graphics software, Adobe Photoshop, agrees the color wheel is round.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.