How much of an expert on color does a designer have to be? If I recall correctly, John Hench was big on this. Everything from which colors go with which other colors (do you take into account the various types of color blindness?) to which colors are "warm" and which are "cold."
I assume most designers don't learn academic color theory, but I'm curious about the balance of innateness and training on this issue. Are most designers tuned in to color and its meanings/shadings/effects intuitively? Or do most have to learn from a master?
You need to get good at it. Many architects are not, but in this business where emotion plays such a big role in the creative outcome, color can make or break what you are trying to achieve. It is one of the biggest areas projects fail in.If you are not technically skilled at it, you at least have to have a feel for it to set a direction. A production designer in movies designs the film based on a color spectrum that mirrors the story. Movies even have a signature palette or color accent that appears in the story. Pixar does this as well with a color storyboard that shows how the film progresses through color.
John Hench was the colorist supreme, although there are stylists you work with that are good advisors, like the one I worked with on Main Street, Katie Olsen.
Again, it's best if you can imagine the scene in color to begin with, or have a palette in mind. It can be a struggle at times when you get down to close swatches or complex interiors. Contrast is the key.
I learned mostly by observing and studying examples in movies and in the parks. Herb Ryman had the best nose for color I had known. He told us not to be afraid of it and he was not. Look at his paintings and he uses colors to elicit emotion that have nothing to do with realism at all. Ron Esposito, who did lots of exterior scenic art direction, had many great tricks in how you choose a base color and age on top of it. That is trickier as the color you start with is not always the color you end with. Certain designers have their own stylistic preferences they repeat and so do I. We just got a huge new set of color swatches at our office, so yes, it's a big deal.
History sometimes has traditions in color and its placement that you tend to follow as you want to make the land period legit to a degree.For example, the "painted ladies" practice of painting all the victorian trim and panels different wild colors is less period and more recent. Real victorian houses of the time period were for the most part darker, more coordinated richer colors and a bit less gaudy.
On MSUSA DLP we set some new directions in the use of color (inspired by European examples) that were copied and used in the other parks, such as using very saturated dark colors (maroon) on facades. That was considered to be too negative by John Hench, till he saw how we were using it and added accents to relieve it.
