The color key is the printed chart that tells you which paint pot goes in which numbered section. On most kits it appears in two places: on the reference print that comes with the canvas, and as a small legend showing each number beside a swatch of its color. Ours is printed at 11 x 17 so it can be read across a table rather than squinted at.
That is the practical answer. The more interesting question is why the colors on that key are the ones they are, which is where color theory comes in, and understanding it changes how a finished canvas looks.
the color guide explained goes through how the key is built, and why a color that looks wrong in the pot is usually right on the canvas.
Using the key well
- Test on scrap paper first. Numbers 7 and 12 can look identical in the pot and clearly different once dry. Thirty seconds of testing prevents an hour of correction.
- Acrylic dries slightly darker and duller than it looks wet. This catches people out constantly. Judge a color once it has dried, not while it is glistening.
- Work under a lamp. The printed numbers are deliberately faint so the paint covers them, and household lighting is rarely enough to read the fine sections.
- Keep the key clean. It is the only record of which pot is which if the labels smudge.
Where the color wheel came from
Isaac Newton split white light with a prism in 1666 and showed it was made of separable colors. He later arranged those colors into a circle, published in Opticks in 1704, and that circle is the ancestor of every color wheel sold in an art shop today. Its useful property is that it puts related colors near each other and opposing colors across from each other, so relationships you would otherwise have to memorize become visible.
Gauguin put the appeal of the subject better than most: Color, what a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.
The three groups
Primary colors
In the traditional painter's model these are red, yellow and blue. The point of calling them primary is that you cannot mix them from the other colors on the wheel, so everything else is built from them.
Worth a caveat, because it is often stated as physical law and it is not. Red, yellow and blue is a workshop convention, and a good one for paint. Printing and modern color science use cyan, magenta and yellow, which mix a noticeably wider range. If you have ever tried to mix a clean bright purple from red and blue and got mud, that is why.
Secondary colors
Mix two primaries and you get a secondary. There are three.
- red plus yellow makes orange
- blue plus yellow makes green
- red plus blue makes purple
Tertiary colors
Mix a primary with the secondary next to it and you get one of six tertiaries. They are most reliably named with a hyphen, because the poetic names below are conventions rather than fixed definitions and different sources place them slightly differently.
- red-orange, sometimes called vermilion
- yellow-orange, sometimes called amber
- yellow-green, sometimes called chartreuse
- blue-green, sometimes called teal
- blue-purple, sometimes called violet
- red-purple, sometimes called magenta
Hue, tint, shade and tone
These four words get used loosely and they mean four specific things. Getting them straight is genuinely useful when you are trying to work out why a color in your kit looks the way it does.
- Hue is the color itself in its pure form. Red, blue-green, amber. No white, black or gray added.
- Tint is a hue plus white. Red plus white gives pink. Tints are lighter and, in acrylic, more opaque.
- Shade is a hue plus black. Darker, and usually a little duller than people expect, because black kills the intensity as well as the lightness.
- Tone is a hue plus gray. This is the one worth understanding. A tone is not necessarily darker than the hue it came from. Mixing in a light gray makes a color that is softer and less intense at roughly the same lightness. Most colors in the natural world are tones, which is why a landscape kit contains so many muted greens and grays and so few pure hues.
One correction worth making, because it circulates widely: tone and saturation are not the same thing. Saturation describes how intense a color is, from vivid to gray. Tone is a specific mixture, a hue with gray added, and adding gray is one way of reducing saturation but not the only one. Two colors can share a saturation and be entirely different tones.
Warm and cool
Split the wheel down the middle and one half is warm, the reds, oranges and yellows, and the other is cool, the blues, greens and purples. Black, white and gray are neutral.
Beyond the mood associations, warm and cool does something concrete on a canvas: warm colors appear to come forward and cool colors appear to recede. This is why distant hills in a landscape kit are painted bluer than nearby ones, and why the warmest color in a picture is usually somewhere near its subject.
Three color schemes worth knowing
Complementary
Two colors opposite each other on the wheel: red and green, blue and orange, yellow and purple. Placed side by side, each makes the other look more intense. That is energy rather than calm, and it is the loudest thing you can do with color.
Van Gogh's Cafe Terrace at Night is the standard example, with a deep blue night sky against the orange glow of the gaslit terrace. He wrote about complementary pairs repeatedly in his letters and used them deliberately.
The caveat is real: complementary colors at full intensity across a whole canvas are exhausting to look at. Most paintings that use the relationship well use a lot of one and a little of the other. Mixed together rather than placed side by side, complementaries neutralize each other into grays and browns, which is the most useful way to dull a color that is too bright.
Analogous
Three colors sitting next to each other on the wheel, such as blue, blue-green and green. One dominates, the second supports it, the third accents. Because the colors share a common ingredient the result is harmonious and quiet, which is why so much of Monet's water lilies work sits in a narrow band of greens and blues.
Triadic
Three colors evenly spaced around the wheel, such as the three primaries. It gives a lively, balanced result and it is harder to control than it looks, because three strong colors compete unless one is clearly dominant.
Why kits number the colors they do
A kit's palette is not a random selection. The design is separated into a fixed number of flat color areas, and the paints are mixed to match those areas, which is why the numbers on a landscape run heavily to tones rather than hues. It also explains the two things people notice first: a large number of very similar greens or blues, which are the tonal steps that create depth, and one or two intense colors that appear in only a few small sections, which are the accents the design is built around.
Once you can see that structure, the order to paint in becomes obvious. Do the large tonal areas first and save the intense accents for last, because those are the sections where a mistake shows.
If you want to go further, our guide to the basic color wheel covers the wheel itself in more depth, and layering acrylic paint explains how these colors behave in coats.
Putting it into practice
Ledgebay kits are acrylic on pre-primed cotton canvas, rolled in a tube rather than folded, with vacuum-sealed paints, brushes in a range of sizes and the 11 x 17 reference print. The landscapes are the best place to watch tonal color at work, since the whole illusion of distance in them is built from it. You can see them all in the catalog.
If a heavily used color runs low before the canvas is done, which happens most often with a dominant sky or background, there are matched extra paint sets for every design. And if you would rather paint your own photograph than a chosen artwork, custom paint by numbers from a photo generates a color key from your picture.
