Ian Furniss Photography » Blog Archive » Colour Theory & Association

Colour Theory & Association

I was never very good with formal education. Most of the time I had other, more important things on my mind .. girls, music, and generally enjoying life. School was boring. The most inane and monotonous repetition of so-called facts with little discussion, and all delivered with as much passion as a party political broadcast. Thankfully it didn’t destroy my own passion for learning and as a result, many years later I decided to teach myself about the things I loved in a way which suited me, and in a way which I understood and appreciated.

I love colours! ‘Colour Theory’ bores the pants off me. In his book Within The Frame, David duChemin gives one of the best explanations i’ve seen if you like the technical side of things so that’s certainly a recommended read, but for the most part, explanations you read will overload you with facts that at first glance seem to make little or no sense at all. Here for example is a colour wheel

Starting with red, it’ll go with the orange and purple because they’re next to it, but it’ll also go with the blue and green because they’re either opposite to it or close enough depending on shades/tints etc. So what’s the point? Well, very little really. If you want to understand why some colours work better with others then you either have to sit through hours of technical nonsense, read David’s book where he explains it clearly and concisely, or alternatively give up and find another way. Since his book hadn’t been written when I wanted to understand it, I opted for finding another way.

The other way, is colour association. Colour association works best for me because my mind tends to work best in a pictorial environment. Now as I mentioned in a previous post, colours have meanings that can vary from culture to culture, but for knowing which colour works well with another the only thing that’s really important is what the colours mean to you. It’s like knowing that Bach apparently wrote Toccata & Fugue in D minor for weddings but in the 60′s everyone used it for horror films. Who cares?! What’s important is that you are able to put two, three, four or however many colours together without them looking painful.

Nature is usually a good place to start your associations since nature does a lot better than humanity when it comes to colour co-ordination. Let’s start with red again and the first image that comes to my mind is Monet and his Poppies, Near Argenteuil. Seeing that in my mind and automatically I know the different shades of green and yellow/brown I can use for a similar effect. Alternatively I could be looking for something less pastel and more ‘warm’ or ‘cosy’. In that case the image that would come to my mind would be rich velvet curtains, a log fire burning in a hearth, perhaps some dark oak beams in a cottage, etc, etc. Again I can take the colours from each of these things and know I have a compliment to the red.

Perhaps you want an antique look to your image. Sepia is going to be an immediate thought, but ignoring variations of black and white and I start to think about the original film version of H G Wells The Time Machine. Set at the beginning of the last century I remember the image of Rod Taylor and Alan Young talking in front of the fireplace, a glass of scotch, the wood and brass used in the time machine itself, the light from the gas lamps, etc, etc.It gives me a starting point and something I can build on when I want to evoke that period.

The references I have are many and each are personal to me. Some come from films or paintings as I mention above, others may be places i’ve been or things i’ve done. You will no doubt have your own associations and using them in this way is for me at least, a lot simpler than trying to remember which colour is opposite which other on a wheel and why one colour works better when it’s ratio is 60/40 rather than 40/60. I’m not saying this is a better way of learning, it’s just a different way and one which makes sense to me. If you can remember all the ratios or prefer to learn the traditional way then that’s great, whatever works best is the way to go, but if you struggle with that way then give this a try for a while. Knowledge is what’s important, not how you gain it or how many rules you remember.