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In the visual arts, hue or tone refers to a quality of color , specifically its perception as warm or cold, bright or opaque, light or dark, pure or mixed. It is also applied to the character of a work or its effect on the observer, generating a state of mind or emphasizing the artist’s message. Colors of muted or opaque tones in a work of art have a low impact on the observer while strong tones generate sensations and make the elements emerge from the work of art.
While hue is technically defined as the degree to which a stimulus can be described as similar to or different from red, yellow, and blue stimuli (CIECAM02: the International Commission on Illumination color model), meaning in art it’s very different. Tone is sometimes also called value, one of the basic elements of works of art, but the concept is different. Value in art is essentially how light or dark an object is on a scale from black to white, and is considered one of the most important variables in a painting’s character, even more so than color selection. Two different colors in a work can have the same value; there would be little contrast between these colors despite the different shades. Or the same hue could have different values, associated with what are called shades and shadows. But hue in art basically refers to the lightness or darkness of a color in a composition. And the tones are found in everything that surrounds us. The sky, for example, is not a homogeneous, solid blue, rather, it is made up of a variety of shades of blue ranging from light to dark. Even an object that is itself a homogeneous color, such as a brown leather sofa, will have different hues depending on its lighting distribution. In this case, the tones are created by the way the light falls on the object. Shadows and reflections add dimension, even if the object is one uniform color.
black and white art
A first approximation to the concept of tonality can be obtained from the visualization of the range of grays. From deep black to intense white, a huge variety of shades of gray can be achieved.
There are several branches of art that today develop their works in what is called black and white art, although in reality they use the range of grays. Within the graphic arts, the comic began as a black and white art form, with ink drawings where the juxtaposition of lines with different densities creates the sensation of shades of gray, with flat and graduated tones related to the technical concepts of color, texture and volume by handling light and shadow.
In their beginnings, cinema and photography did not have the possibility to expose colors and were black and white art forms. But even with the incorporation of color, black and white photography continues to develop very important artistic expressions by providing the artist with particular aesthetic tools that allow them to focus on the shape and relationships between the objects in the composition regardless of their colors. The quality of black and white photography is associated with what is defined as the zone system, a concept coined at the end of the 1930s and associated with photographic developing technology, which can be translated into the expression of aesthetic possibilities. of the range of grays in the work. The zone system divides the gray tone scale into 11 equal zones, assigning each one the average tonality and relating each zone with a role in the composition. For example, zone 0, pure black, and X, pure white, are only used for external sectors of the photographic composition and do not expresstextures or details , while zone VI, a shade of light gray, can represent light skin or shadows on snow in sunny landscapes, and zone IV, a shade of dark gray, can be used to represent foliage, dark stones or shadows in a landscape. In addition to photography, black and white art forms are also currently being developed in short films and feature films.
The color
Each color can have an infinite variety of shades but it can be difficult to perceive them if the attention is focused on the color itself. To see the tonal values of the colors we can remove the color and analyze only the shades of gray, as described in the previous section. Before images could be processed using computers, a series of monochrome filters were used to render shades of gray so they could be analyzed, and remove the hue from things like paint pigments. Today computer image processing allows you to take a photo and convert the color of any artistic object into a gray scale and thus define its tones.
The global key and the local key
A painting can have a general hue, which is called the global hue . For example, a happy landscape may have a vibrant overall tone, while a gloomy landscape may have a gloomy overall tone. This specific type of tonality can set the mood of the piece and convey an overall message to the viewer. It is one of the tools that artists use to transmit sensations to the spectators who contemplate their work.
In a similar way you can define the sidetone ; this is the tonality that a particular sector of a work of art takes. For example, consider the case of a painting of a harbor on a stormy night. The overall tone may be somber, but the artist may choose to illuminate the section of the painting in which there is a ship, as if the clouds had parted just above it, letting in the moonlight. This section of the painting would have a localized light tone and can give the piece a romantic feel.
Sources
Antonella Fuga. Art techniques and materials . Elected, Barcelona, 2004.
Antonio Valero Muñoz Principles of color and holopainting . Editorial Club Universitario, Spain, 2011.
Enrique Lipszyc. Comic strip technique Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1967.
What is value in art and why is it so important? l Atelier Glez Consulted in August 2021.
