From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Fundamentals

How color works - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Fundamentals

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How color works

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- In this chapter, I address one of the most fundamental concepts in the business of computer graphics and design. And that is color, the entire rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Good old Roy G Biv, only that's not really the way color works. Whether in the world of computer design or just plain regular design, Roy G Biv is at best an old-timey toddler's fable. Colors aren't pneumonics, they're wavelengths of light to which our eyes and our minds assign subjective values. Tell that to your seven-year-old and the world will be a better place. For example, let's imagine yellow, shall we? We know that yellow exists because it has a measurable wavelength, but there's no empirical evidence that your impression of yellow and mine are the same. For all I know, when you look at a clear blue sky, you're seeing what I would call yellow. It's not likely, but we really don't know. And yet, regardless of what you and I see, we can measure. And happily in the digital realm, color is a finite arena with some fixed rules. Just as when you were a kid, you blend a color using a handful of primaries. So here are the childhood primaries, red, blue, and yellow, which don't really deliver a pretty rainbow. Over on the right, we have a halfway decent orange, but that's really it. Otherwise, various shades of mud. So instead, we work with tested professional grade primaries. On screen, it's red, green, and blue, as indicated by RGB with R repeating on the other side so that we have a full range. It's like an RGB ring. In print, we have the process color inks cyan, magenta, and good old yellow. At the end, cyan repeats so we get green. Now there's also a fourth ink, black. It's the key lining, so it's K for black or just key. What does that key unlock? The deepness, the darkness, and the shadows. Now, in day-to-day life, most of us take color for granted. But inventing color, actually mixing it, that's another matter entirely. And once you mix a particular color you can save it as a swatch that you can repeat over and over inside a document and even trade between files, colors, and swatches. Here, let me show you exactly how they work.

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