Lessons from Light Spring
In previous articles, we learned how every temperature has a full rainbow of hues, and how we adjust those hues by adding a clear, white, grey or black ‘medium’ as the tonality requires. That leads to palettes that each have a version of pink, red, orange, yellow, chartreuse, sap green, true green, turquoise, cyan, blue, purple and violet.
But those are just the clear colours. There are other colours in a palette besides: pastels, darks and neutrals. In this article, we will start with pastels.
Pastels are often associated with the Light Seasons, as well as the Summers. For good reason: the Lights are a great place to learn more about pastels. Let’s look at what happens in the Lights when we do an imaginary paint mixing experiment.
We start with a paint that is just pure pigment in a clear medium. Since there is nothing to dull or soften the hue with, all of it comes though. That gives a very bright colour. As we have seen before (part 3), this colour belongs in the Bright tonality, since there is no trace of white, grey or black.
Now let’s start adding small amounts of white medium to that paint. The white lightens the colour, so we end up with a lighter colour in the Brights. But white also softens our paint colour. As we continue to add small amounts of white, at some point our paint drops below the brightness range of the Brights, and enters the range of the Bright-Light tonality.
We continue to add white and the paint becomes lighter and softer still. We descend down the range of the Bright-Light tonality and beyond it, into the range of the Light tonality.
At this point, the paint is already rather milky, but still works as a rich and bright colour in the Light palettes, because that tonality by definition requires having a large amount of white.
Still, we add more white medium. The paint becomes lighter and softer still. Now it reaches the very tip of the Light tonality: the lightest a colour can be and still be a clear colour. At this point, we have equal amounts of white and coloured pigment in our paint. It’s 50-50.
Now we add a tiny bit more white again. The balance tips. There is more white medium than colour in our paint. The paint is no longer a clear colour, not even for a Light palette. It has become a pastel.
This pastel still has quite a lot of pigment, and therefore is quite ‘fruity’ and fairly gentle. Which is just right for a Light tonality pastel.
Now let’s continue adding white. Now that our paint has more white than colour, the white we’re adding doesn’t soften the colour anymore. Instead, we’re getting the opposite effect. With every bit of white were adding, the pastel gets ‘louder’, starker and thus brighter. At some point, the colour becomes too bright to remain in the Lights. Our paint has become a Bright-Light pastel.
We continue our paint mixing with more white again. The pastel passes through and exits the Bright-Light pastel range, as it becomes whiter and starker. The pastel has now become a Bright pastel, which is typically called an icy.
We’ve now used up an extraordinary amount of imaginary paint, and we moved from the Bright clear colours all the way down to the tip of the Light colours. There we encountered the pastel point, the turning point where our clear colour transitioned into a pastel. As we continued to add white, we encountered pastels for the Light, Bright-Light and Bright tonalities. We arrived back where we started and completed our loop.
Our other tonalities (Soft-Light, Soft, Soft-Dark, Dark, Bright-Dark and Median) also have pastels. These contain a small amount of grey or black to adjust for the grey or black that these tonalities are based on. This is why we didn’t encounter them during our paint mixing experiment, we only added white. But if we were to take the Bright pastel/icy, added a smidge of black to soften and darken the colour, we’d have a Bright-Dark pastel. Double that smidge and we’d have a Dark pastel. The rest works in similar ways.
So what have learned from our experiment? Pastels are a class of colours separate from clear colours, that consist of more white than colour, and may contain trace amounts of grey or black. Pastels occur in every tonality. The more white a pastel contains, the brighter it is.
Now let’s we look back at the Seasons. There tend to be pastels scattered in here and there, but True Summer is where we find most of them. However, a lot of True Summer pastels actually belong elsewhere (why is it always True Summer?). In fact, a few of my True Summer drapes turned out to be Dark tonality pastels.
Given the Soft-Light qualities of True Summer, and pastels being generally soft and light, it is not surprising that these colours get placed there. However, not everything that is soft and light actually belongs to the Soft-Lights. Every tonality has their pastels.
Reason 5: Many pastels are placed in the Lighter/Summer seasons, but pastels belong in every palette.
So instead: Sphere palettes all received pastels calibrated for their tonality.
Now that we understand how mixing with white creates a different tonal class of pastels, we can also imagine how mixing with black creates the tonal class of the darks. Which we will continue learning about in the next article.