Introduction to Color Expert Johannes Itten

“Color is life; for a world without color appears to us as dead.” – Johannes Itten

When you take an art course on color theory, you can thank Johannes Itten for laying much of the foundation for what you’re being taught. Johannes Itten was a Swiss artist and teacher who taught at the Bauhaus in Germany. He published several books on art theory, the most popular being The Art of Color.

Sir Isaac Newton is credited with creating the first color wheel, which included 6 colors: red, orange, yellow, green, cyan and blue. Around 250 years later, Johannes Itten expanded Newton’s color wheel to include 12 colors instead of 6. These 12 colors included red, yellow and blue as the primary colors; orange, green and purple as the secondary colors, and 6 intermediary colors created by mixing a primary color with a secondary color. This is the same color wheel often used in school’s today to teach students about color theory.

Itten also examined color saturation, contrast and hue, devising theories for creating different color combinations that are still useful to artists and designers today. He looked at the expressiveness of color, and also the way colors affect one another. He also explored the emotional properties of colors which he considered to be fairly subjective, proposing that we each have different individual reactions to colors.

For more information about Johannes Itten and his color theories, look for his books online or in your local library.

Be a Artist in 2 minutes with Segmation SegPlay® PC (see more details here)

Segmation

FREE Newsletter

Join us on Facebook

SegPlay® Mobile iTunes now available for iPhone and iTouch

www.segmation.com

About these ads
Explore posts in the same categories: Art, Art Appreciation, books, books online, color wheel, Farbkreis, Johannes Itten, library, The Art of Color

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.

12 Comments on “Introduction to Color Expert Johannes Itten”


  1. [...] Introduction to Color Expert Johannes Itten (segmation.wordpress.com) [...]


  2. Artists are amazing. It’s like they sketch a soul they can see that the average person cannot, and then colour it in so that the average person can see it – by its colour.

  3. digger666 Says:

    Thanks for “liking” a few of my posts. Given your affinity for colour, perhaps this post might interest you: http://digger666.com/2012/09/13/a-book-that-shows-every-color-imaginable/


  4. I agree! The world would be dead without color. Fall wouldn’t be fall with out the color changes of the leaves! Thanks for the introduction to Johannes Itten. I really enjoyed learning about him from your blog.

  5. grahammb Says:

    Who knew! Sir Isaac and the color wheel. Love learning factoids like that!


  6. Thanks for following my blog, http://portraitsofaddiction.com
    I’m glad you found the Hurricane Sandy blog inspiring. Looking forward to checking out your posts and learning more about you.

    -Andrew Seaward
    aaseaward@gmail.com
    http://portraitsofaddiction.com

  7. kelihasablog Says:

    Thank you for stopping by my blog… I look forward to checking out your blog as well… :D


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s


Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 7,968 other followers

%d bloggers like this: