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I know this audience is mostly knee deep into the last of your Christmas cards and you’re ready to talk red and green…

Let’s finish the Autumn color series and we can move on to the ho-ho-ho stuff next week.

In our last episode…

Here’s a little recap about what we talked about-

First, the brain makes lots of assumptions about color. We took a little test to see just how skewed your sense of fall color is. Read the full article here.

Then I explained why you see autumn colors as brighter and more saturated than they actually are. It’s all about your predator brain filling the missing data in the dark. Read more here.

Finally, I showed you how modern technology is altering our view of reality. All those Photoshoppers are doing some serious damage. See why here.

Now, lets close out the series with the root cause of your whacked-out sense of fall color.

And hey, if you’re sick of talking about autumn color, don’t worry.

There’s a Christmas tie-in at the end.

FOUNDATION

Every week I begin Beans with a pretty photo and a marker below, telling you which important color I see.

But let’s be honest, if I hadn’t already told you about the E07 in today’s photo…

Most of you would have been hunting through your R and YR markers to color this autumn scene.

Weird, eh? And now that you see the E07, you can’t unsee it.

It’s everywhere!

So how did you miss it?

So far in this series, we’ve blamed Crayola, your lizard brain, and wine moms who drunk-edit on Instagram. They’re all wrecking your autumnal color accuracy.

But today, you knew your judgment was gonna be off and yet you still jumped right to R27, didn’t you?

Are you always this wrong about color?

Relax.

Yes, some people are truly horrible with color but you’re not one of them.

This is a fall problem more than a you problem.

From September until Stick Season, Mother Nature does her best to make drab colors brighter.

Ask anyone about the colors of fall and they’ll name a leaf color.

Orange. Red. Gold.

But those aren’t the main colors of fall. And if you live in an area where the seasons actually change, you know exactly what I’m talking about…

The predominant color of autumn is brown.

Brown is everywhere.

Autumn brown not a nice brown either. Fall is a lot of dirty dirt and tree bark. We romanticize brown with poetic names like Brunette, Pecan, and Burnt Umber but let’s face it, it’s all just mud and dead stuff.

Don’t underestimate brown though.

There’s a reason the best autumn art projects include a healthy dose of dark chocolate brown.

It’s because brown is the base. It’s the foundation

Brown makes fall possible.

Dark browns make fall look fallier.

Think back to when you were raking the last of the fall leaves across the green lawn. If you really step back and look at it, a pile of leaves is a lot of dull tans, duns, and faded yellow, right?

But then you see three scattered leaves on the wet pavement or a few leaves scattered across the mulch in the flowerbed by your front door…

And they’re stunning!

They’re the same leaves. Nothing changed except the context.

Color is always a comparison game.

We judge a color by the other colors around it. So in the case of fall leaves, your brain is doing all kinds of quick micro-calculations comparing the orange leaf to all the other colors around it to decide how orange the orange is.

Now the internet experts teaching Color Theory for the Gullible, they always reduce this concept down to complementary colors— How orange looks orangier in comparison to it’s opposite color, blue.

And this is the danger of learning color theory from someone who learned it five minutes ago.

Color is more complicated than simple complements.

There’s another comparison game and it’s far more important than kindergarten-ish color wheel calculations.

Brightness in context.

Orange leaves on a green grassy lawn, even a green lawn that’s tired and dying back for winter… orange leaves look dull on the lawn because realistic autumnal orange can’t compete with the green.

But that same orange radiates agains deep brown, rich black, or wet asphalt gray.

The natural beauty of a fall leaf has very little to do with the hue.

Brightness in context is what makes a fallen leaf look amazing.

Natural, realistic, and accurate fall colors only look vivid in comparison to the dark and dull.

Now here’s where your fall coloring goes wrong.

You’re seeing all of this glowing autumnal beauty in the world around you but as you prepare to color a fall project, what’s the first color you try to leave behind?

Poor brown.

It’s out there doing the hard work, making fall look special and you don’t even notice it.

Remember what I said about brown earlier? Here’s a quote…

“brown is the base. It’s the foundation.”

Dark brown, dull brown, mud brown. They’re structural colors.

So when you color leaves in red, orange, and yellow and slap it all on a white card base? It looks like a flamin’ mess because it’s unsupported.

There’s no foundation.

You missed the E07 in the photo above because on your bleached white swatch card and with no support, E07 looks dull.

But in our photograph, E07 is undergirded by a structural color.

E07 looks like more because with a foundation under it, it can be more.

Through this whole series of articles I’ve been hammering away at our tendency to make fall brighter than it ought to be, as if that’s a bad thing.

But brightness doesn’t have to be a problem.

You can grab all the flamin’ fire colors you want and use ‘em everywhere…

As long as you support it.

It’s kinda fitting that sticks and mud are what we build our homes with. Okay, now we use lumber and engineered cement but it still boils down to sticks and mud.

Foundation and structure.

If you don’t have it, your house falls down.

The same thing happens in coloring.

Go ahead and celebrate fall with the brightest colors you can find. Go ahead, I dare you to finally use that FYR1.

Just make sure you’ve built a brown foundation under it.