Color Variations 3 - Saturation

Color Variations 3 - Saturation
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Colored pencil on paper, 6.5" x 10"
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Saturation, or the intensity of a color, is another way of describing a color. Saturation refers to the purity of the color, or how much the color has been dulled by the addition of any other colors. A color with high saturation is as brilliant and clear as possible. A color that is de-saturated is reduced to a tone in a gray-scale.

Adjusting the saturation of a color allows an artist to emphasize or de-emphasize certain parts of an image, to make a brilliant red flower stand out against a reddish-brown or a dull pink background. An artist can add depth to a landscape painting by reducing the saturation of colors representing areas in the distance, while reserving the most highly saturated colors for areas in the foreground.

In this drawing, I made all the colors as saturated as I could, by pressing hard with the colored pencils to cover the paper completely, so that the white of the paper would not make the pencil colors appear pale and dull.
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