Colour, 2nd Edition

FOREWORD

Fifteen years ago, a fellow student at Rhode Island School of Design showed me a group of small paintings she had done in a class with David Hornung. She called them her “Wonder Bread Dots.” As I looked through the work – page after page of gouache gumballs perched inside six-inch colored squares – I knew I had to take David’s class. Poetically titled “Handmade Light,” it was the color theory course I’d always hoped for.

David’s approach hinges on the recognition of three constituent parts of color. Hue is what we generally mean when we talk about color – the redness or blueness of something. Value, or quantity of light, describes lightness or darkness – how a color would look on a grayscale, or in a black-and- white photograph. And ...