Zed A. Shaw, Painter

So I think I'll try to explain what I've learned about "color scheme" paintings, and there's an interesting thing related to one of my biggest hatreds regarding design education: IT'S ALL ABOUT THE VALUES. First, what's a color scheme?

The main organization of these wheels is based on which pigments will "cancel out" or "gray out" another pigment. So the colors that cancel or gray out are directly opposite each other. Red is opposite Green, and they make a gray. This is stupidly called a "compliment".

People think, "compliment? Wow. So like Bacon and Eggs? Chips and Salsa? Honey and Cheese? They go together?!" Then they combine green and red and get a pile of baby poop and wonder how the hell these possibly "compliment" each other.

A color scheme is usually just some kind of geometry laid over the wheel. Pick total opposites on a straight line (red green) it's a compliment. Pick two nearby it's analog. Pick three equally spaces it's a triad. And so on. And, designers who talk about this get it wrong.

Take a look at an example: https://www.canva.com/colors/color-wheel/ … Now, *every* design book and course I've ever seen talks endlessly about color and comes up with these schemes, then goes to do a design and if you do this your design looks like shit, and theirs is subtle and nice. Why?

They say "pick like, yellow green, blue violet, and orange then TADA design it!" Then two pages later go "oh but you have to think about contrast". Then they stumble around trying to explain how to use a color scheme because they're missing a single word: value

Value is the monochrome parts of what you see. Monochrome vision is what lets you walk around and see what's in the world. It gives you form, and lets you see in 3D and read and shit. You can be totally color blind and still walk around and see what's going on because of value

Value is so fundamental that it's *very* difficult to find anyone who is missing it visually. Like, if you can't see color you can still see. If you can't see value then you're basically blind because it's just a random mess of colors with no form. But, not for designers.

Search all over the design blog world and not a single mention of value. Even though it's a central concept in all visual arts, and without it you can't render anything, I haven't ran into one book or author who uses the word or even knows the concept. Why's that important?

If design had value CSS would be value first, color second. You'd indicate the monochrome levels of every element, then simply give a color scheme assignment to each element and your design would be about 90% right. Artists always say "get the values and color can be anything."

When you are told "pick 3 colors to make your color scheme!" You're being lied to. You need to pick 3 colors, AND give each element a value from light to dark with that color to do a *real* color scheme. That solves your context. In fact, color doesn't matter.

In the color scheme style of painting they basically prove this. You first have to do a fairly accurate monochrome underpainting so that you know where the values are, then you can literally put any colors on as long as they match the values.

If you paint with pigments that let you accurately match the color of what you see then your values are handled for you automatically. But, if you want to use a color scheme you have to rely on a good monochrome rendering to keep things straight. That was my big mistake.

I was used to just mixing the color for what I see, then painting it. So I was trying to do extra duty by mixing the color scheme, trying to work out the values, and trying to balance where it went, and it was too damn hard. A monochrome painting solved it easily.

Which would also work for design, especially CSS, if designers knew about and focused on values first the way artists do. Color isn't important, and should be easily malleable. An idea CSS would let you assign values, then kind of randomly choose colors until you like it.

The ideal workflow would then be: 1. Do the whole design in monochrome so that it is easily comprehended. 2. *Without changing any value assignments*, add the color scheme or try several to find a good one. 3. Then refine the colors and values to solve interactions between them.

Or: 1. Do the fully rendered drawing. 2. Figure out the color scheme. 3. Paint it in the design while maintaining the values. Then it'd be way simpler than the current design method of "pick a color scheme then randomly place things on a grid and alter it until you like it."

Finally, another way to put it is that CSS (and designer) color understanding is too complex because it's not broken down into the logical components that matter to human comprehension: value, hue, intensity so that you can manipulate them independently of each other.