How Color Works

Book excerpt: How Color Works: Color Theory in the Twenty-First Century propels students into engagement with color via critical and creative involvement. This interactive book describes how color contributes to meaning in specific masterful artworks (with large full-color illustrations), and encouragesstudents to produce color variations of their own in response. How Color Works approaches the aesthetics of color in contemporary terms and is relevant to both traditional and experimental approaches to art-making How Color Works seeks to demonstrate the importance of color in broad terms, and intends to be used by art students in all media who wish to expand their understanding of color and how it works artistically. In several respects, How Color Works presents color in more contemporary terms thancompeting texts. It describes relevant color science in current terms, where inquiries into subjective color experience and objective color space are not settled at all, but contested and argued. Digital color, an entirely new area of pursuit, is explored on an equal basis with aspects of printproduction and more traditional media.Where science is described, opposing theories and unanswered questions are presented. Furthermore, color and meaning are presented in culturally specific terms, encouraging students to appreciate the power of color to affect meaning based on specific social histories. Exploring lesser known colorcontributions in art and scholarship, How Color Works: Color Theory in the Twenty-First Century demonstrates that interest in color is alive and well, even in surprising corners of artistic production, and offers a course of immersion that will teach students with no prior experience how to createand use color in a sophisticated fashion.