Understanding Color Theory
Theories of color are mostly concerned with color in light and color in pigment. Computer screens, cameras, video equipment, and theatrical lighting work with the colors in light. Painting, fabric arts, and many crafts work with the colors in pigment. There are some crafts that work with both, including glasswork.
The colors you see on painted and other pigmented surfaces are transmissions of spectrum. What we understand as color are light waves that transmit information to the retinas at the backs of our eyes. The idea of the spectrum is easily visualized by thinking of a rainbow. Starting at the low end moving to the high end, we get the following colors: violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. If you hold a prism up to a beam of light, it refracts the photons, or light particles, to make the familiar rainbow.
If you live with someone, say a teenager, who for some reason has an orange bulb in his bathroom, the blue soap you make for him will look black. Which, depending on your point of view, could be a wonderful thing.
When “white” light is directed at a painted surface, we see the color of the pigment on that surface. When a tinted light hits the same surface, the color we see is changed by the way the color of the light and the color of the pigment interact. Because you will usually be seeing your soap creations in light that is intended to be close to “natural” light, you won't have to worry much — if at all — about how they look in colored light.
The Color Wheel
A very useful way of thinking about color requires the use of a color wheel. You can purchase one at an art supply store. Or, you can make one with some heavy white paper and a medium-sized box of crayons. A simple color wheel can help you a great deal when working on color for your soap projects. To make your own color wheel, draw a circle with a black crayon. Divide the circle into three even pie shapes. With the clock as a model, put yellow at 12:00, red at 4:00, and blue at 8:00. These are the primary colors that cannot be created by mixing other colors. Next come the secondary colors, which are mixtures of two primaries. Yellow and red make orange; red and blue make purple; blue and yellow make green. Select those colors from your crayon box and draw lines with each between the corresponding positions on the wheel.
Then we have the tertiaries. Remember wondering what was the difference between blue-green and green-blue? Well, that's what you're working with now, colors with two names. Think of the first word in a two-name color as an adjective; it describes the second word. So, find the orange-yellow crayon. It is yellow with orange in it. Then comes yellow-orange, which is orange with yellow in it. It can seem like an inside-out way of thinking about it until you lay it out on the color wheel. Work your way around your color wheel, making a line or wedge of color to go with each name. When you're done, it will look like a circular rainbow.
Complementary Colors
Once you've completed your color wheel, take some time to make observations. You will discover that things about color you may have taken for granted and understood intuitively are explainable through the relationships on the color wheel.
For your first observation, look to see what colors are opposite each other. Start with the primaries. Yellow is opposite secondary purple, red is opposite secondary green, and blue is opposite secondary orange. You can see a pattern: In pairs of opposites, called complementary colors, secondaries are the complements of primaries.
Graying Out
If you were working with true pigments, complementary colors mixed together would make black. True pigments are not usually used in soap-making, so you would likely get a shade of brown. Adding a little of a color's complement, called “complementary mixing,” is an extremely useful way to make a vibrant color less so. It is often called “graying out.”
When experimenting with the gray-out factor, you need to remember that the yellowness of the soap will decrease as the soap cures, so you need to be sure not to overdo your compensatory mixing.
The gray-out factor presents a challenge when you want to create soap in shades of purple. There will normally be a yellow to yellow-green cast to your base oils. This will usually lighten with time to a creamy yellow or just cream color. Think of the complementary pair of yellow and purple. When you add violet oxide, for instance, you will achieve a grayed-out yellow, then a grayed-out purple before achieving a clear purple. It will take a lot of purple pigment to compensate for the complementary mix.
