Colour Proportion, Entry 1.

Colour proportion refers to the amounts of each hue from the colour palette is used in the overall composition. Generally, there are three defined applications for colour in relation to proportion, These are;

1. Dominant colours
2.Sub Dominant Colours
3. Accent colours.

In this order. Usually, an image has a Dominant colour that has the majority coverage within the piece. (A good example is the red room in The Dessert: Harmony in Red by Matisse, which I covered previously here)

The dominant colour helps to control the overall effect of the image, for example, a nighttime scene may have a dark blue dominant colour, to keep the scene's night time setting consistent. Whilst other colour will occur in the scene, even potentially very bright colour, the dominant colour will maintain the setting or 'mood' of the scene overall.

Sub dominant colours are now introduced into an image primarily to describe areas of interest. Sub dominant colours tend to still hold a sizable amount of area coverage within the image, but are always a decent amount smaller than the dominant colours. Their smaller quantity makes sub dominant colours good for highlighting areas of interest for the viewer. For example, our night time setting of dark blue hues may have a small town bathed in yellow light, the area is considerably smaller than the large amount of blue hues in the scene, but the fact it is smaller and different from the blue hues makes it an area of interest and attention.

Finally, Accent colours are colours with vastly contrasting aspects to the colours already present in the image. Be it a saturation contrast, a value contrast, or simply a contrast of hue. These areas of colour are very small, designed to jump out of the image and grab the viewers attention first. The viewer is drawn the the area of highest visual contrast, the accent is designed to fill that role and control the most important focal points and the order they are perceived and read by the audience. Going back to our imaginary image of the small town at night, this could be a lone tree in the town center, with a small, well light shot of bright green leaves, contrasting the blue hues of night around the outside of town, and the yellows of the town itself.

Without well considered Colour proportion, a composition runs the risk of being boring, or bombarding the viewer with too much information at once.

it is especially important in images using Triadic or Tetradic colour palettes, as the large number of strong complimentary hues can cause undesirable clashes in the image, or produce a jumbled mess of colours without proper consideration of which of the strong hues should be dominant.

With the principle of colour proportion explained, let's look at some examples in the next couple of posts.