The GdkRGBA struct is a convenient way to pass rgba colors around. It's based on cairo's way to deal with colors and mirrors its behavior. All values are in the range from 0.0 to 1.0 inclusive. So the color (0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0) represents transparent black and (1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0) is opaque white. Other values will be clamped to this range when drawing.