A picture, the worn cliché postulates, is worth a thousand words. Words are meaningless without context, without language, structure, or grammar. So, too, are pictures meaningless without form, composition, or coloreven if that color is in tones of gray or just black and white.
Color is about communicationspeaking of aesthetics, organization, importance, or emotion. Choose warm colors such as orange to attract attention, subdued hues like green to distract it. Fill an object with red to evoke passion, with blue to promote serenity. Use gradients and gradient meshes for subtlety and realism or to create faux dimensionality or motion. Tell a story with your Illustrator drawings.
Each field of designfor print, the Web, or broadcast, and all the smaller fields within themhas its own language of color. For print, that language is limited by the abridged dictionary of CMYK ink, but the other two are more intricate, fuller languages the breadth of human vision, in the larger gamut of light-spectrum-derived RGB. Learn to speak each language fluently, adjusting for the dialects spoken by various color-rendering devices such as computer monitors, scanners, printers, and imagesetters through their ICC profiles.
Compose your illustrationstell a storyas would a writer. Describe beauty in the meter and rhyme of a poet, schematics and diagrams in the crisp pragmatism of technical writing, advertisements with the languid flourish of a copywriter, and illustrations with the variegated and robust adjectives of fiction.
Simple, concise sentences are usually the most effectively communicateddon't draw in an overly complicated tongue. Neither should your illustrations be laconic. Using only short, simple sentence structures robs your prose of the richness of language variance, ultimately sacrificing interest. Verbalize the language of your art in CMYK or RGB, using not only the basic nouns and verbs of fill and stroke, but also the fertility of the language's adjectives and adverbsgradients and transparency.
In this chapter you learned the alphabetthe basic building blocks for the languages and dialects of color possible within Illustrator CS2. What will you now write?