Natwerk Designs

Colour psychology & stage lighting design?

Public Comments

1. I'm not sure about the question but color has a huge impact on how an audience feels during a show. I have spent about 20 years working in volunteer theaters and my brother is a theater major with an emphasis on lighting design. There is an excellent website that will give you lots of information on what certain colors mean and the effect that they have on people. It has to do with Crystal colors -- but still applies.... go to crystal-cure.com and check it out.
2. When we use colour in stage lighting we use it to achieve an effect based on the director's and playwright/librettist's desires. To effectively say "red is danger" would be wrong. Each individual use of colour is different. As paint is to a painter light, and it's colour or lack thereof, is our's. One can convey a sickly feel by using yellows as against human skin it gives a jaundiced effect. Blues can traditionally signal night, especially used as down-lights. Sunsets and sunrises are obviously beautiful cyclorama lighting effects. Scrims can be used to make things appear and disappear by the way light is applied to the texture of the drop. But a specific answer would be unprofessional. I offer these examples to show a minute possibility of what can be done using light not even having mentioned holograms, projections, film, washes, spots, the role of darkness, up-lighting, down-lighting, front lighting, modeling the human figure etc. The best possible answer I can give you is that a good stage designer can create the psychological effect desired with light, absolutely but it is a very subjective topic and you would need to considerably narrow your question's parameters