Yellow in Context

What do all these color swatches have in common? They're all bright yellow. 

OK, so what's the catch? They are all bright yellow as seen in the right lighting context. That pale one and gray one at the bottom left are bright yellow in a bluish light. The dark brownish colors are yellow in shadow.

All of those swatches come from screenshots of the "minions," the bright yellow characters in the animated film "Despicable Me."


(Link to video) Here's the new trailer for Despicable Me 2 where the screenshots came from. The lighting designers did a great job of shifting the gamut from one range to another in less than two minutes of screen time.

To achieve a feeling of colored light, a painter must often shift the mixture far from the local color. A good rule of thumb is that the color of a given mixture is a combination of the local color and the color of the light source.

Related post: Color Constancy
All this is covered in my book, Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter
Images ©Universal