Channel Frederator Blog

Which of these characters is friendly?

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While you may be familiar with the characters themselves, one big clue is their color. The warm, friendly red and yellow of Mickey Mouse is in sharp contrast to the cool grey and sickly blue color of Ursula the Sea Witch.

How can you pick the right colors for your character, set, or dress for Friday night? Well, a great start would be to look at a color wheel.

The first color wheel was invented by Sir Isaac Newton. He split white sunlight into red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, and blue beams; then he joined the two ends of the color spectrum together to show the natural progression of colors. Newton associated each color with a note of a musical scale.

A century after Newton, Johann Wolfgang Goethe began studying psychological effect of colors. He noticed that blue gives a feeling of coolness and yellow has a warming effect. Goethe created a color wheel showing the psychological effect of each color. He divided all the colors into two groups – the plus side (from red through orange to yellow) and the minus side (from green through violet to blue). Colors of the plus side produce excitement and cheerfulness. Colors of the minus side are associated with weakness and unsettled feelings.

The current form of color theory was developed by Johannes Itten, a Swiss color and art theorist who was teaching at the School of Applied Arts in Weimar, Germany. This school is also known as ‘Bauhaus’. Johannes Itten developed ‘color chords’ and modified the color wheel. Itten’s color wheel is based on red, yellow, and blue colors as the primary triad and includes twelve hues.

Since animation is an artform in which we try to get a response from an audience by communicating visually, we can use color theory to help get our ideas across. A blue character will appear cold while a red one may have just injested a hot pepper. A deep purple character may try to steal our lunch money, while a yellow character may want to teach us our alphabet.

To learn more about color online, check out the following sites:

Color Matters

Worqx

Color Wheel Pro

-Floyd Bishop