Color Gradient
Smooth, continuous shifts from one colour or tone to another, in painting, woodblock prints, airbrush, light and digital art.
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About
A gradient replaces a hard boundary with a gradual change, so a sky can pass from deep blue to pale gold or a background can fade to nothing. Oil painters achieved it by blending wet paint, and Renaissance and Baroque skies are full of carefully graded blues. Japanese woodblock printers developed bokashi, wiping ink across a dampened block so the colour thins across the sheet; Utagawa Hiroshige's landscape series of the 1830s rely on it for dawn and dusk.
In the 20th century the gradient became a subject in its own right. Colour Field and Light and Space artists explored soft transitions of hue, and airbrush and spray made perfectly even fades possible. Digital tools later turned it into a standard graphic device, linear when colour shifts across a surface and radial when it spreads from a point. James Turrell's light installations produce gradients with no surface at all.
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