MART-601 Lessons

Professor Rosenquist is at the front of the Magical Art classroom putting the finishing touches on today’s decor with her wand. The classroom is currently a multitude of colors that are so vibrant that your eyes almost hurt. The color of each student’s desks reflect a different color of the rainbow and they’re arranged from warm colors to cool colors while Professor Rosenquist’s desk is a vivid emerald green with silver accents. The walls of the room are adorned with gorgeous pastel colors, the floor is a marble white, and the ceiling appears to be the deepest shade of black that you may have ever laid your eyes on. A picture of the color wheel is on the board near the professor’s desk with a white poster board that appears to switch between different color schemes.

With a satisfied smile, Professor Rosenquist takes a seat at her desk right before students begin to file into the classroom. Most of them stand baffled at the various colors in the classroom while others trudge to their seats, completely unphased by the rainbow nightmare that has been set upon them. Once the students settle, a knock is heard at the door and an eccentric man steps into the classroom. Professor Rosenquist rushes over from her desk with a grin, slings an arm around the man in greeting and guides him over to her desk, offering her chair with a “take a seat, I insist.” Then she straightens up and turns to address the students.

Have you ever been to the end of the rainbow? No, you haven’t and neither have I, but I’d like to believe this room is a good representation of what it would be like. Joking aside, welcome back to another week of Magical Art! As you can see, we have a special guest here with us, I will introduce him later on. If you are also taking Defense Against the Dark Arts this year as well, I’m sure he may look familiar to you. After Professor Penrose brought up his special guest in our passing conversation in the corridor, I couldn’t resist sending him an invitation to come lecture on something that relates to our topic of color theory today, however, that will be towards the latter half of the lesson. You’ll have to put up with me for the first half, but I’m sure that doesn’t matter to you. After all, you wouldn’t be coming back every week if you didn’t like my antics! Alright, let’s make haste and move onto the lesson.

We see color everywhere in our world, from those lavish feasts in the Great Hall to our reflections or even in our own magic. While I won’t get into the science of how color is produced, I will talk about its significance in art. It is an element of design that is produced when light strikes an object, and some of that light is absorbed into the object while some of it is reflected back to our eyes, which in turn registers the reflected light as that object’s color. There are three properties of color: hue, saturation, and value. A hue is simply the name or description we give a color such as red or blue. However, when you are painting, a hue is also known as a pure pigment that hasn’t been tinted (by adding white) or shaded (by adding black). Saturation refers to how intense or dull a color is, while value, as we learned already in Lesson One, is how light or dark the color is. You can use these terms to describe colors when you are looking at art. For example, the piece above is OLD STREET 2 by Leonid Afremov, a palette knife oil painting. Notice how the artist used a myriad of colors in abstract strokes to depict this street scene. Looking at the colors, we can say the colors are heavily saturated and that the artist used different hues and value to reflect the lighting in the painting. Areas near the light poles are flush with yellows, oranges, and reds, while shadows are depicted with greens, blues, and purples. Not to mention that palette knife paintings are also known for their actual texture due to the amount of raised paint brushed on with a palette knife rather than a paint brush.

Like many other seemingly simple things in this world, there is a theory behind color. Although artists such as Leone Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci wrote about basic color theory principles in their notes, the actual tradition of color theory took flight around the 18th century thanks to none other than fellow alchemist and wizard Sir Isaac Newton when he published Optiks in 1704. Although the prism spectrum is actually a straight line, Newton depicts it as a circular color wheel. A color wheel is an abstract circular illustration showing the relationships of the different categories of colors. Newton’s color wheel only displays spectral hues, divided based on the intervals of the Dorian music scale (on the piano, this would be an octave from D to D on only the white keys, or the interval pattern of W-H-W-W-W-H-W). This original color wheel had the purpose of illustrating a rule for the color produced through the mixture of lights, predicting the number of rays per spectral color presented by using the center of gravity.

Later color wheels, such as the one on the right, were devised to show an equal division of colors and to illustrate additive color mixtures. What does this necessarily mean? Colors are split into three different categories: primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. The primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) are the three basic colors that can be combined to create any other color, however, other colors can’t be combined to create a primary color. Secondary colors (green, orange, and violet or purple) are colors created through mixing two primary colors together. Tertiary colors (yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet, red-violet, red-orange, and yellow-orange) are the colors that are made through the combination of one primary color and one secondary color. The colors on a modern color wheel are arranged to show this relationship, such as, for example, red and blue are separated by their secondary color, violet, and are further divided by the tertiary colors red-violet and blue-violet. By showing these categories of colors, artists use the color wheel as a tool to pick color schemes for their art. A color scheme is the selection of colors used in an artwork.

Another major use of Newton’s color wheel and its descendants is its use of depicting complementary colors, or colors that cancel each other’s hue to create an achromatic hue. The neat thing is that the colors directly across from each other in the wheel neutralize each other (i.e. red neutralizes green while orange neutralizes blue, and so on). One practical application of this property is the chemical properties of dyes. Have you ever decided to bleach your hair using the mundane approach rather than using a simple Color Change Charm and your hair turned either brassy or yellow-ish instead of the light blonde you wanted? In order to neutralize the brassy complexion of your hair, you will need to use a violet-hued toner to not walk around with that offensive banana tone since violet is opposite of yellow on the color wheel. Another similar example would be how stage makeup is used in both magical and Muggle theater. There’s a pretty good chance that your skin is not perfect. You may have red spots or a yellowish tone to your skin. Makeup artists use color theory to neutralize these imperfections with a green or purple concealer so that they can’t be seen from the audience. Of course this use extends beyond cosmetics as you may be able to tell. The crest of Beauxbatons Academy of Magic, pictured on the left, is an example of a complementary color scheme, using the colors blue and orange (though it’s more of a cyan and gold, they still are complementary), which are opposite of each other on the color wheel. You will find this color scheme common with holidays such as Christmas (red and green) and Mardi Gras (purple and yellow). There is a variation of this color scheme known as the split-complementary color scheme, which is the use of one color (such as red) and the two adjacent colors of the one across from it in the color wheel (yellow-green and blue-green). The complement of the middle hue (either of the two opposing colors) may also be used as well as black and white.

The monochromatic color scheme (also known as dominance harmony) is when the art is colored using different variations of a single hue. White and black can be added to create tints and shades, and a complementary color can be used to lower the intensity of the monochromatic palette as you can see in The Blind Man’s Meal by Pablo Picasso (c. 1903). Notice how even though the painting is mainly monochromatic, varying shades of yellow are used and mixed in to create a small amount of variety within the mainly blue piece. However, the overall color scheme of various blue shades ties the piece together nicely and creates unity.

In contrast, the exact opposite of this and similar color schemes is an achromatic color scheme, which is a color scheme that either uses pure achromatic or near neutral colors. The pure achromatic colors are black, white, and various shades of gray and are described as desaturated or colorless. Near neutral colors are typically browns, tans, pastels, or darker colors. The portrait on the left is one of the various portraits of Helga Hufflepuff hung around the castle. If I remember correctly, this one in particular resides in the Grand Staircase. Notice how even though it isn’t composed of pure achromatic colors, but near neutrals instead. Even though the painting isn’t necessarily black or white, it’s very muted and desaturated through the heavy use of browns and tans.

An analogous color scheme is made up of three adjacent colors on the color wheel, consisting of one dominant color (either primary or secondary) and two complementing colors (tertiary). While these three colors can be picked from anywhere on the color wheel, this color scheme is commonly picked from either the warm or cool colors. Warm colors are hues ranging from reds, oranges, and yellows with the inclusion of browns and tans in order to represent either a sunset or daylight. They are said to stimulate the audience and appear to be more active in art. Meanwhile, cool colors range from blues, purples, and greens while including most grays. These colors imitate either an overcast day or the colors of the night. They can bring a calming effect to a piece of art and also makes the overall effect of the art quiet. Take a look at the two paintings by John Pototschnik below. Although they are depicting the same exact house, one has an analogous color scheme of warm colors while the other has one with cool colors. How do the two color schemes portray a different feeling of the same house?

Last but not least are triadic and tetradic color schemes. As hinted by the names, these color schemes are determined by the amount of colors used in the artwork. The triadic color scheme is created by using three colors that are equidistant from each other on the color wheel. This forms a triangular shape or a triad of colors. This color scheme is very rich and often a favorite among artists for its vibrancy. It’s also an easy way to balance out a piece of art as well as create unity. One example of a triadic color scheme is to simply use the three primary colors. A tetradic color scheme uses four colors (sometimes more) on the color wheel. While it is probably the richest of all the color schemes, it’s also the hardest to balance, as using all four colors equally may make the art look chaotic. There are two different patterns associated with tetradic color schemes. The first is a rectangular selection of colors, which is the arrangement of two complementary pairs. This allows for more variation, but is harder to balance. Usually this is solved by either making one color dominant or subduing the colors. The other is the square color scheme, which consists of four evenly spaced colors on the color wheel. While this may work best by distributing all four colors evenly, it also limits the amount of variation in your art.

Choosing the right color scheme depends on what kind of feeling or message you want to send to the audience. What mood are you going for? How will it reflect the subject of your art? While this all may seem trivial, color is one of the most prominent elements of design you can utilize in any type of medium, whether it be painting a masterpiece or creating a mosaic, and can be an important tool in implementing several principles of design. Anyway, I will leave my soap box and hand the mic to Professor Adalbert Scantlebury. Although he is a physics professor in the United States, he is an alumnus of Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and has doctorate degrees from… What Muggle university did you say you studied at again? Pit? Mitt? Oh! MIT, yes, he has PhDs in both physics and chemistry and has been researching the correlation of magic and science. Although I am your Alchemy professor, this type of science is out of my range of expertise, so take it away Professor Scantlebury.

Goooood morning Magical Art students! I’m so glad Sera was kind enough to invite me to speak with you today; might as well make the most of my time across the pond. So! Colors! Professor Rosenquist has done a fantastic job explaining pigment based color theory, otherwise known as RBY, or red-blue-yellow theory, but the colors you see when you cast a spell are light! Light color theory works just a smidge differently. If you think about all the spells you know and what color light they produce, you may notice that a large majority are either red, green, or blue. These are actually the primary colors of light, and they combine slightly differently than your paint colors, as seen on the right. This is because light color is determined by something called wavelength. Light moves through the air in waves, and these waves can be short and fast or long and slow. While paint color is also determined by wavelength, it is determined by the wavelength reflected rather than the wavelength emitted. Red has the longest wavelength, measuring at 700 nm, while the color blue is only 400 nm, and all of the other colors of the rainbow fill the spectrum in between; this means that the further down the rainbow you get, the shorter the wavelength you are seeing. Pretty cool, right?

Now what causes these wavelengths to be shortened? In our case, it is the magical energy that we are applying through the application of willpower. The greater the amount of energy that we apply to a spell, the shorter the wavelength. However, the intent or purpose of the spell must also be taken into account, otherwise its color would change every time you cast it, as it’s impossible to apply the same amount of willpower every time you cast a spell. This is why some of the most Dark spells you know have a green color, rather than the purple you might expect. These Dark spells require some of the most intense willpower you will encounter, but they are not the most inherently powerful spells as, while severe, their effects target the physical, easily manipulatable world. There are other, more complicated spells in the form of rituals whose purpose it is to change the very nature of the existence. The power of the words and actions of the spells themselves add to the energy of the willpower of the spellcaster such that those with purple light are the most powerful form of spell-based magic known to wizard-kind. I believe Professor Penrose mentioned you will be learning more about these in your Year Seven Defense Against the Dark Arts class.

Your spells that dip into the blue spectrum require more power as they alter the target at the molecular level. Though the Unforgivable Curses and other Dark spells affect the target internally, they do not necessarily begin affecting the molecules of the target. When you cast the Freezing Charm, a curious charm that sends out a bright blue light, you are changing the molecular activity of the target. It takes a lot of energy and power to remove the heat from the target and slow the shakes and jiggles of the atoms. Do any of you have little siblings? Do you know how hard it is to wrangle them when they’re hyped up on sugar? Freezing an object is like trying to subdue a crazy child. Requires lots of energy!

So this leaves us with purple. Spells colored purple are extremely rare. These are your hard-core rituals and enchantments that not many wizards can complete. They require an intense amount of both willpower and intent. Imagine the hardest spell you’ve ever cast and double it; triple it; quadruple it! Few of you will probably ever cast these spells in your lifetime, but if you do, oh, they are a sight to behold.

All of this said, magic is a tricky little thing. I’m sure you all know that by now. It loves to be inconsistent and throw wrenches in our theories, which is why magical theorists still have a job! Everything I’ve told you today is based off of the current theories held by the magical community, but they are in no way perfect. We may yet prove to be wrong - only time and further research will tell. Who knows, maybe one of you sitting here will eventually be the person who figures it out! For now, I return you to Miss Serafina. Ta ta, dearies!

Oh, I didn’t know we were on a first name basis but thank you Professor Scantlebury. It’s certainly a pleasure to have you today! On that note, we will be closing our section on the basic elements and principles of design, however, do remember them as they are fundamental for our study of different mediums later in the course. As usual, don’t forget to do your assignments and be sure to come back next time as I indeed have another surprise guest coming! Oh the suspense is killing you, isn’t it? I’ll take my leave now with that last thought lingering in your minds. I will see you next week! … So, Adalbert… Actually, I will call you Bert. Looking at your credentials, Bert, how exactly does one get nominated for World’s Hunkiest Nerd in Witch Weekly? I’ve never quite figured out how they pick their people.

Lesson written by Professor Serafina Rosenquist
Guest lecture written by Professor Mary Mitchell