Color & What it Means

Colors are used to evoke meaning, space, and even emotion and thought. Color can achieve this in a way that form, motion, and sound fall short of. Color Theory provides guidance about how color can be perceived, how it is applied in different mediums, and the visual effects of color combinations. Artists, like Adera Brown, know the basis of every color meaning and usually use multiple in a singular piece of work. Adera states that a signature in her abstract works is to mix 2 warm colors with 2 cool colors. Check out how Adera uses color to convey meaning below.

Pink: Playful, Youthful and sometimes soft. Can symbolize class or elegance with a lighter shade or bold in terms of a hot pink. A funky, fun color.

Red: Passion, Love, Anger, Vibrancy. A primal color but also is the color of blood. Blood being an essential part of life or the loss of life reminds me of how impactful that color is. A great color of power.

Orange: Enthusiasm, creativity, energy. It is a very youthful color and in a majority of my artwork that I am working with now. Orange can be loud but also very calming in darker hues (fall shades)

Yellow: Light, Happiness, bright and joyful. Can also be used as an alarm like on caution tape. All in all yellow is an attention grabber, the color of sunshine.

Green: Growth, Health, wealth, thriving and movement. Green means go or that things are attainable. Green can make you feel safe, energized, healthy. Can also symbolize envious, jealous, greedy emotions.

Blue: The most calming color to me, blue is also a color of movement like water and peace and relaxation. A color of trust, and stability. Can also be equated with sadness, depression and other deep emotions.

Purple: Royalty, wisdom, harmony. Can also feel whimsical and potent. Also associated with deep emotions

Black: Luxury, Stark, Power. Can be a little mysterious but also can excuse class and decorum. I use black in all of my designs because of the boldness of it, the finality of black lines and black shapes.

Warm: Reds, yellows, and oranges, that tend to make you think of sunlight and heat.

Cool: Blues, greens, and purples that tend to make you think of coolness as well as night, water, grass, and the sky.

Symbolism and Color

A great example of how color can symbolize different meanings and evoke emotion can be found in flags. Take for example Ryan Hernández-Almonte’s illustrations about the history of the Puerto Rican Flag. Hernández-Almonte’s describes how the original flag was intended to represent a newly formed independent Republic of Puerto Rico. In this original flag white represented the redemption of their homeland from Spanish rule. Red represented the heroes of the rebellion-- those who fought and died for the independence of the people and their land. The white star and blue represent the dream of freedom held by the Puerto Rican people. Explore how the symbols and colors of the flag changed as the island’s political status changed.

Colors: Adinkra

Beyond their use in the flags of nationstates, color and patterns are important parts of how clothing communicates ideas about the wearer to others (Young, 2006). We can see an example of this in the production and use of adinkra cloths by Ghanaians. The word adinkra translates to, “a message one gives to another when departing” (Willis, 1998). Adinkra has traditionally had wide use in funerals, where those attending the funeral wear adinkra cloths to give messages to the soul of the dead as they depart into the afterlife (Willis, 1998). More contemporary uses of adinkra range from use in funerary traditions to architecture, company branding, fashion, art, and social activism; it also has uses in educational contexts as a valuable knowledge system. The symbols are a collection of ideograms and pictograms that represent proverbs, myths, expressions, social norms, community values, and the philosophies of the Akan people (Arthur, 2017; Willis, 1998).

The cloth pictured here embodies adinkra’s use and the computational knowledge held within the adinkra production process. You see an example of another algorithm within cloth making: a stamping algorithm. This adinkra cloth uses a more complex pattern that leverages nested iteration. Can you see it? Follow this link to see a simple way to explore the modular arithmetic used in the process: https://csdt.org/culture/adinkra/stamping.html.

In addition to symbols having importance in the Adinkra knowledge system color plays a large part as well. The Akan color symbolism is a tripartite (consisting of three parts) color system with the three basic colors including tuntum, fufuo, and kɔkɔɔ (kokoo). Tuntum is the name for very dark color approaching pure or absolute black. Tuntum represents death, loss, the underworld, and the ancestors. Fufuo is comprised of pale colors that are shades of white, like ivory or egg shell. These colors are associated with coolness, purity (especially spiritual purity), virtue, victory, happiness, deity (God), and the ancestors. Finally, kɔkɔɔ are those colors that are shades of red, yellow, and brown. Shades of red are associated with heat, anger, crisis, blood (life and vitality), grief, danger, witchcraft, and war. Shades of yellow represent prosperity, royalty/rule of a king, maturity/prime of life, glory, the presence and influence of God.

One way the Akan conceptualize life and the life cycle is through this tripartite of colors. The beginning of life is characterized by white and then moving clockwise one enters into youth and adolescence represented by yellow. From there, one enters adulthood represented by brown. Eventually we all reenter the spirit realm with death represented by black. Life is continuous for the Akan; the colors merge together and form a multicolored center representing that life is the sum of all its parts.

You can learn more about adinkra in the Adinkra CSDT.