Catherine McGinnis give pointers on color theory.
Catherine We are going to move on to color theory A Yea Catherine Yea, color theory. We are going to start with happy, sad, excited, what do you think? A I think of Twister, A little kids game, remember? Catherine So colors produce both negative and positive connotations. White - it's often associated with hygiene, clarity, purity, cleanliness, simplicity, sophistication and the negativity sometimes it can be pretty sterile, especially in a hospital environment. Red strength, energy, stimulation, excitement, defiance and aggression. Blue - intelligence, trust, proficiency, serenity, coolness, calmness and then aloofness and emotional. Yellow - optimism, confidence, friendliness, creativity but yet it can also mean anxiety. Purple - spiritual awareness, luxury, quality and decadent. Green - harmony, balance, environmental awareness, equilibrium but it also can mean stagnation. This is counter psychology in soapmaking. Counter resonates with different people in different ways. When I showed you just the line screens with the colors, I was looking at all of you, looking at the emotions on your face. Some maybe, someone when I did the white it felt stark, maybe someone else likes the white. Everybody sees color in a different way. We all have our favorite set of colors and we are drawn to that. I really love purple. I don't know why I really love purple, but it's my favorite color. Kevin Mandel loves purple, that's why I love purple. In many of the soaps that I make, I always add purple. Do my customers like it, I'm not sure, but it's something that I'm drawn to. It makes me feel comfortable and there may be a different color for each of you. But the color you use in the design projects can tell you a lot about the work itself. It's important to remember the context. Looking at words and images is important when you are trying to connect to the user brand. Website or package. Have you ever gone to a website and the background was red. How did that make you feel? Like all red, I'm talking about the whole background which was just red and the words were black on it. Was that easy to read? Did it kind of agitate you a little bit? A Yes. Catherine For example, say your sweetheart gave you a heart-shaped box full of candy. Did you have the same feeling with the red? A No Catherine So considering your target market when selecting your colors. It's also important to consider cultural differences. What may signify one thing in the Western culture it's interpreted differently around the world? For example, purple is often associated with royalty, especially in England or also in the US, but in Brazil, that color signifies mourning. Here are more examples. For example, in America, red, we look at it as love, we think of Valentine’s Day, red heart, anything to do with red, we think of love, but in South Africa, it also means mourning. Yellow, we think it’s sunny and bright and joyful, where in Greece that is considered a sad color for them. And green we think of maybe St. Patrick's Day, four leaf clovers, luck. In North America they think of it as corruption and the drug cartel. A North Africa. Catherine North Africa, not North America, but North Africa, and then blue in America, we think of it as masculine colors, baby boys wear blue, and baby girls wear pink, well it’s just the opposite in China. I say this so that you will consider when you're making soap and many of you make it in Florida, sell it in Florida, but maybe, not maybe, but when you get to be an international soap seller, you may be sending your soaps to, for example, China, and you make a boy's soap with a boy's scent and you make it blue. Well in China they are going to get confused because they associate blue with girls. So you just keep in mind the color schemes that you use and what they mean in different colors. I mean different countries. You also associate color with scent. Both color and scent you have emotional components to them. They can either cheer you up or they can calm you down and they can also trigger a memory and help bring balance to your life. So I was telling you, my gramma, my mom’s mom, and you all know my mom, used to wear, after she took a bath, she would put on Johnson baby powder. Every time I smell Johnson’s baby powder, I think of my gramma. Does anybody else have any kind of scent? So essential oils are most often associated with a color of their flowering parts. If I say lavender, what do you think? Exactly. If I say, let me think of another good one, jasmine. What color do you think of, white, yeah, yellow maybe in the middle? So, for example, a red colored soap scented in lavender that would only confuse your senses. Is it wrong to do it? Absolutely not, you’re the artist of your creation. But any way you want, think of your target audience though, do you really want to confuse them? If you pick up a red soap, you’re maybe thinking cherry or strawberry, and you smell lavender, you are just going to confuse them. What? Mine altering soap, exactly. So people define fruity scents with like pinks and reds and musty scents maybe with orange or brown, would be like cinnamon or something like that. I was wondering if I could get someone from the audience to be my guinea pig. Okay, come on. Can you see anything? A No, I will just close my eyes. Catherine Okay, anybody remember these? A Yeah, I do. Catherine Let’s see how she does. Okay, I’m right here and I promise I won’t hurt you. I want you to smell something for me and I want you to put it in your hand. It’s a marker, but I don’t want you to get it on your nose. Can you smell it? A Is it lemon? Catherine It is lemon. What color do you think then? A Yellow Catherine Absolutely right, it’s yellow. Okay, let me get another one. Don’t get it on your nose. Tell me what color you think of. A Red Catherine Exactly right, that’s strawberry. Uh, let’s give you. A Blue Catherine It’s blue, it’s blueberry. I know you’ll get this one. Oh sorry. This is getting worse and worse. I’m going to take it away and give you another one. I know you’ll get this one. I’m taking it away and giving her another one. It’s okay, I’ll move on to another one. That one was orange. Oh this is the last one. I don’t want to confuse her brain. Okay, this will be the last one. Let’s see if you can get that one. No? It was grape. It’s getting worse so we will be done with it. They were markers, but you did great. The purpose of that was, let me get back of here and tell you. Everybody remember these markers when you were a kid? The purpose of it was just to say the brain works with your senses. She did really good on the lemon. Just for example, so the lemon in her brain really really says yellow. So if I had you as an experiment, maybe she would have picked a different color. What you remember, what your brain remembers is what you think of it as that color. So that was an experiment. Thank you so much. I really appreciated that. So let’s move on to the colors themselves. The primary colors in a color wheel are yellow, blue and red. Secondary colors on a color wheel are orange, green and purple. We all know, maybe you don’t know now, but we will know, when you mix yellow and blue you get green, which is a secondary color. When you mix yellow and red you get orange, secondary color. When you mix blue and red you get purple, a secondary color. Then, if you mix those two colors next to each other, you get the tertiary colors, but they don’t get fancy names. They are yellow red, red orange, red purple, red blue, blue green and yellow green. If we split the wheel in half, you have the warm colors and the cool colors. You will always remember that the warm colors have red on it and the cool colors have the blue on it, kind of like your faucet, hot and cold. Though the use of complimentary colors used in soapmaking is really important. When you place complimentary colors next to each other, the colors appear brighter and stronger. Complimentary colors are across from each other on the color wheel. They can either be primary colors, secondary colors or tertiary colors, but they are directly across from each other, like the yellow and the purple. Here let me show you what I mean. Blue and orange are complimentary colors. Both of them pop, right? And I’m glad you mentioned that so, so Elsa is that you that mentioned New Orleans Saints? So why do you think the New Orleans Saints picked those colors? Yeah exactly, and do you have any other reason why you think that the New Orleans Saints picked those colors? They’re complimentary colors. The Florida Gators, the comment was the Florida Gators do orange and blue and they are also, and you know orange and blue are what? They are complimentary colors. And then the bottom one, we know, what does that screen say to you? Christmas. What did Jesus pick, red and green? Probably not, but somewhere along the line, some marketing genus - so the purpose of the complimentary colors, the reason I’m showing you here is, if you use them in soap both of them will appear brighter. You have to use complimentary colors, absolutely not. Yes? The comment was, and I didn’t know, in hair coloring the complimentary colors neutralize each other. Really, interesting. You would get, when you mix the two together you’ll get a brownish nutty color. So when you add white to any color it becomes a tint. Notice the same exact colors with white added, almost like a pastel. If you add black to any of those, notice the exact same colors we started with, we added white for a tint, we added black and that’s called a shade, so the use of analogist colors is also aesthetically important in soapmaking. Placed next to each other, it’s called harmonize. So before we were trying to make the other one stand out from the other and this time we want to harmonize the colors, and they mostly often found in nature, like plants, if you look at a leaf at any plant, you notice that it’s a green, a lighter green and a darker green. Those are analogous colors and they are next to each other on the color wheel, so you usually start with a primary color and here we have green, which is a secondary color, so let me go back to that, so the primary or a secondary color and we have green and the secondary color we have a blue green and yellow green, those are analogous colors and we can also, oh and here you see them as an example, whereas before the other ones shouted out against each other and here these kind of all kind of blend together, blend is the wrong word, they all kind of harmonize together, they feel like just a smoother transition between one another and we can also add a tint as we did in the first one or we can add a shade to get a totally different color just by adding the white or the black. So if you are creating natural bars, one color of plain soap, no color whatsoever, does color matter? Absolutely not. But if you want your soap to stand out among the rest, color is the peak. We are going to make soap today and the soap we’re going to use is we’re going to have micas. You are going to blend your own colors, so I’m going to show you how to do that right now. I gave you a small small overview of color theory. But are there any questions on what I presented. Can I have those cups? Okay, what I have here, has anybody ever used mcas before in their colors? Okay and how do you add your micas when you add it soap? Do you premix them or put the powder right in the soap? You mix them either way? Today we are going to premix them in little bit of olive oil so what you have is everybody has three sets of micas and all I gave you is the primary colors, not because I’m mean, but because I want you to mix your own colors. I want you to know how to mix your own colors. Micas come in every color, every shade, every tint of the rainbow, but if you know how to mix your own, you really only need three. These are stable and cold process soap, we have red, yellow and blue or sienna, magenta and yellow. You each have the three colors, we look at the color wheel and I’ll say I want to make it easy, I want to make it purple, so I’ll take equal amounts of red and equal amounts of blue and I get purple. Say I don’t want, I love this color, it’s beautiful, but I’m going a little bit over on the color wheel, I actually want the red purple, all I have to do is to add the same amount of red, one unit of red and it’s going to bring me over to that red. I don’t know if you can see it. So, I’m going to let you guys, Brit is going to come around and he is going to give you three of these, and then in your box, that says spoon swirl are your micas, so I’m going to let you mix your micas and then we are going to watch a video on how we’re going to do the soap technique. Well what you want to mix it is in what is stable. All those have a shelf life, olive oil usually have a year of a shelf life, whereas maybe hemp oil has maybe three to six months, so you want to mix in whatever has the longest shelf life. Take a little bottle and just squirt it in when you need it. You can also mix micas in glycerin. I find it’s thicker and I think they mix a better for me in olive oil, but that doesn’t mean you have to mix yours in olive oil, but some them are not water soluble. Whenever you make a product with water, you always want to add a preservative, because water can grow mold, so doing an oil or glycerin base mixing your colorants is what I advise. So all I need you to take out is your Popsicle sticks and just your colorants.