100+ Words Related to Color

October 6, 2023

Color adds vibrancy, complexity, and interest to your daily life. You don’t have to be an artist to learn about words related to color, and boosting your “color” vocabulary can certainly help you understand how color works.

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Words Related to Art

Table of Contents

Tint

When people think of words related to color, like “tint,” they often imagine something that appears darker than normal, like a tinted car window. You might be surprised to learn that, in the art industry, this word means to take a particular color and make it lighter, not darker. For example, the shades of color that you typically refer to as “pastels” are tinted colors.

Color Wheel

If you have ever taken an art class, especially at the elementary level of education, your instructor may have taught you about the color wheel. You might even have constructed one of your own.

A color wheel is basically an illustration that shows the relationship between colors. There are primary colors, which serve as a base for all other colors. As you move along the wheel, you will also see secondary colors, which are primary colors blended together.

Finally, a color wheel will also show tertiary colors, which you make by mixing primary and secondary colors together.

Palette

If you’re having a conversation about art, you might use the word “palette” in several ways. A palette is an object, usually made of wood, that you use to hold dollops of paint when creating a piece of art. However, you can also say that you like the palette in a particular painting. In this case, you are using the word to refer to the range of colors that the artist has displayed in the work.

Contrast

Pablo Picasso is one of many famous artists who are known for the use of contrast in their paintings. If you apply contrast to a work of art, it means that you are arranging colors or textures or levels of brightness that appear to be opposites.

For example, painters in the Renaissance era often used contrast to add depth to a painting. They might also apply the technique to draw your eye to a figure in the forefront of a painting as opposed to objects or people in the background.

When thinking of contrast, think of words that are opposites, like light and dark or smooth and rough.

Luminosity

Since paintings are created by substances that you apply to a canvas, there can’t be actual light in a painting. However, you can create the illusion of light by applying various techniques, including contrast, which was mentioned in the previous section.

Luminosity refers to the brightness or illusion of light emanating from a painting. Have you ever looked at a painting of a sunrise over the ocean, for instance? You may have felt as though you were seeing actual rays of sunlight beaming down onto the water. That was luminosity (an illusion) that the artist created.

Chroma

You may have heard the word “chroma” referred to as “intensity” or “saturation” in discussions about art. It is the brightness of a particular color in a painting.

Another way to explain it is to say that chroma is the degree of purity of a specific color. The more vivid or strong a color looks, the more saturated it is. Artists say colors like this have a “high chroma.” If you have a low-intensity color like gray, you could say it has a weak or low chroma. On the other hand, a bright orange or candy apple red are examples of high chroma colors. They are more vibrant and saturated than neutral shades like gray.

Hex

Don’t forget to include “hex” when creating a list of words related to color. You would normally use this word as part of the phrase “color hex code.” It is an alphanumeric code that describes the values of the colors red, green, and blue in digital format.