Color is a product of light Color references change as light changes. There is no one consistent color for any object. Grass may be gray at dawn, bright green at noon and nearly black at night. Monet's work may appear at first an arbitrary use of color, but when we become aware of the time of day the painting was made, we realize that his work captures a fleeting sensation of light. Rarely do we see a color by itself, usually it is in conjunction with other colors.
Colors can change dramatically depending on changes in their surrounding colors.
The complementary of a color appears in adjacent zones. Optical effects a light area next to a dark area will appear lighter than it is in fact, and the dark one will appear darker. In digital color, the artist selects colors from either a color wheel palette or a commercial catalog of colors, such as the Pantone color system. Photomechanical color printing Ink printing uses the same idea by layering different quantities of cyan, yellow, magenta and black dots on paper. The dots are so tiny that we are usually totally unaware of them.