Advancing with Watercolor: Immersion - Color Key

Color Key and Mood

First question - What is mood and how do we evoke it.

Mood is a combination of many visual qualities that we have been exploring already - a big one is edges.

The next 2 weeks we will look more closely at color and how does color create mood in our painting.

What is color key - A Color Key is a dynamic range based on the lightness or darkness of a color. Possibly you have heard of the terms high key mid key or low key. For us as artists the idea of changing the color key of our painting opens new possibilities in bring mood and light into our painting.

In the examples we notice a striking difference in the use of color . The terms make more sense when we compare them side by side. To complement our understanding I will introduce the value scale and show you how the artist organizes their lights and darks along this scale.

The outcome is of course the most important part and this would be the mood or feeling that is achieved in each color key.