Color — Light Made Visible
Colour is not decoration added on top of a drawing. Colour is tone, temperature, emotion, and light — inseparable from form, inseparable from meaning.
The first cycle of creativity approaches colour through one of the most systematic and practical frameworks ever developed for artists: the Munsell Color System.
Albert Munsell’s colour wheel organises colour along three dimensions:
- Hue — the colour itself: red, yellow, green, blue, purple and all the steps between
- Value — the lightness or darkness of the colour, connecting colour directly to tonal understanding
- Chroma — the intensity or saturation of the colour, from neutral grey to the most vivid possible expression
This is not colour theory as academic abstraction. It is a practical map that allows the painter to mix, modify, and relate colours with intention rather than accident. Combined with the tonal understanding developed in the Tone pathway, it gives the painter genuine command of the most expressive element at their disposal.