Brown Story

---for Karen---

In color theory brown has an amazing role. Before my study of color, I thought brown was, well, just brown. The color of dirt, of baked bread, of autumn leaves. It is all that and more. Brown is not just one color, but many.

Brown can be made by shading, that is adding black, to yellow, yellow-orange, orange, red-orange, and red. Simple enough.

Betty Edwards in her book, Color, uses the humble paper bag to illustrate brown as a mixture of three primaries. Her paper bag starts with a mixture of yellow and red in a two to one ratio to make an orange. She adds a lot of white. Then she adds a little blue and we get the tan of a paper bag. This tan is low in chroma, that is it has less pigment than the color wheel primaries. And it is low in value, that is it is lighter than any of the primaries. So brown can be made with all of the cool colors (blue, green, and violet) as well as the warm colors (yellow, orange, and red).

Tones--gray added to a color-- are many times a brown. If a lot of light gray is added to orange, we get a brown tone called beige. Beige is very low in chroma and very low in value, but still its hue is orange.

Other descriptive words for brown in addition to tan and beige are rust, khaki, ecru (a very light beige), sepia, and umber, just to name a few. Brown has meanings beyond the mixing of colors. Brown can symbolize gloominess and earthiness. Brown in the political arena of the thirties and forties was represented in Hitler's Brown Shirts. Brown is the color of baked bread, roasted meats, coffee and chocolate--very savory indeed. Brown is the color of November as fall slides into the whites and grays of winter.

Brown is one of the English "color words," the eleven elemental words that name colors. Those words are: Red, blue, yellow, green, blue, orange, black, white, gray, pink, and brown. Brown is the Everyman of color, useful and full of paradoxes.