Color is one of the most powerful of elements. It has remarkable expressive qualities. Understanding the uses of color is vital to effective composition in design and the fine arts. The word color is the general term which applies to the whole subject - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, black and white and all likely combinations thereof.

Hue is the perfect word that can suit to refer to the pure colors of the spectrum. Every known color can be described in terms of value and hue. Moreover, several physical phenomena as well as psychological effects collectively affect the way we perceive the color.

'Value' is the term used to describe the darkness or lightness of a color. It indeed is a vital for an artist or a designer in the way it designs the spatial illusions. The contrast of a value isolates the objects in the space, while the value gradation suggests contour and mass of the contiguous surface.

Hue is a relative word used for the pure colors of a spectrum that are usually referred as red, yellow, orange, blue, violet, green that do appear in the rainbow or a hue. In fact, all the existing hues can be mixed and combined from the three fundamental hues called as the primaries. The speculative resultant will be black when all the primary pigments are mixed with each other. Therefore the pigment mixture often is called as subtractive mixture.

The primaries comprises of three hues from which all the other hues can be created. Primary colors have 2 commonly used definitions: Painters primaries consisting of red, yellow and blue, Printer primaries consisting of magenta, yellow and cyan and Light Primaries consisting of red, green and blue.

Complements are the colors that stand contrary to one another on a hue circle. When a complement is mixed with another complement in the paint, the resultant tone de-saturates or dulls the hues. These opposite pairs can even be traced with respect to their relative coolness and warmth. The cool-warm contrast of the hue can cause an image to appear to recede or advance. For instance, in a 15th century painting, warm reds of the doublet of a man and the cap of his son reinforce the placement cues in order to make the figures to appear very close. On the contrary, the cool variants of the sky and the sea suggest a great distance.

Few color effects happen only in the eye as well as on the brain of a percipient and not by the properties of the light waves and pigments. However, these illusions appear dominant and show a big impact on our responses to a color.

Optical mixtures can be obtained when particles of variant colors are mixed. The mixture type differs from the pigment mixture it is based on the light primary colors. But however, the optical mixture differs from a pigment mixture where the primaries are mixed to black and from the optical mixture where the primaries are mixed to white. The hue and the value in the optical mixture can be averaged and that results in the grey.

Optical mixture is experienced when examining many textiles. It can also be perceived in natural objects, color television, and printed color pictures.