So if you do these exercises, the iPad is a good way to go. I did some of the later exercises with water-based markers, which were a good way of having a limited, but still expressive, palette. A limited palette of colored paper would have prevented this. This was also a downside, though, because I sometimes got bogged down fiddling with the lightness and saturation of a color. Working digitally had these advantages, plus some that weren’t available in Albers’ day, like measuring precise color values, blend modes, and adjusting hue/saturation/brightness after the fact. Albers recommends using colored paper rather than mixing oil paint because it’s hard to get precise mixtures in paint, paper is less messy, and the focus stays on how you’re perceiving color rather than trying to get the right mixture.

I did most of them in Procreate on my iPad. Because of this, they aren’t meant to be good, by any definition of “good.” They aren’t pretty, the colors aren’t harmonious, and any layout and shapes are arbitrary. These exercises’ aim is to show a particular color effect that exploits a gap between what’s physically happening, and what humans perceive. Warning: This post ended up being longer than I was expecting, so feel free to just skim through the pictures.

Now that I’m done, I thought it would be fun to share the output of those exercises, both for posterity and the benefit of others. As a result, it took me at least 4 years, off and on, to get through it all (you could do it in a couple of months if you were diligent, though).

To get the most out of the book, you need to do the exercises, and often many times to make sure you’re getting the desired effect. He teaches you to see this relativity of color through a series of exercises. As Albers says, “This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.” Reds can look cool-toned, and blues can be warm-toned. What looks dull in one context may look bright in another. The way humans perceive color is influenced by the surrounding context of neighboring colors, lighting conditions, size and quantity, what we look at before and after, and more. His central thesis is that there are no absolutes in color. In contrast, Albers’ teaches you how to truly see color. Or as Albers puts it: “Experience teaches that in visual perception there is a discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect.” Other teaching methods focus on theory, color systems, the physics of color (wavelength, rods and cones, etc.), or resort to rote rules like, “red means danger.” It’s mechanical, mathematical, rules-based, and divorced from how people perceive and react to color. Interaction of Color is, by far, the best book on color I’ve ever read. Exercises from 'Interaction of Color' by Josef Albers

Interaction of Color by Josef Albers