Colour - First Research.

Any student or artists has the privilege of spending hours, days or months perusing the conclusions of a great man & profiting from a life time of ardent inquiry & understanding. 

I have been reading a book called the elements of colour by Johannes Itten. As i am making my way through it i thought i would add some blog posts on what i am learning as i go along. First part of the book explains how colour is seen...

Colours result from light waves.

A kind of electromagnetic energy. The human eye can perceive light waves lengths between 400 & 700 Millimicrons only. Each hue can be accurately defined by its waves lengths/ frequency. The light waves are not coloured - Colour arises in the human eye & brain from measured differences in photosensitivity.

Basically Light is made up of wavelengths of light, each one is a particular colour. The colour we see is a result of which wavelengths are reflected back to our eyes.

White objects appear white because they reflect all colours. Black objects absorb all colours so no light is reflected.

The visible spectrum is the rainbow of colours produced when white light is split by a prism.

If i held up a red and green filter to a lamp i would get black. This is because the Red filter absorbs all the rays in the spectrum expect red and the green all but the green, so no colour is left out giving us black.

Colours from absorption are called subtractive colours, the colours of OBJECTS are mostly subtractive of natural colour.

Basically, objects can look like different colours because they absorb wavelengths and reflect other colours.  So a red shirt looks red because the dye in the shirt is made from molecules in the fabric, and that absorbs the wavelengths of the light from the violet/blue end of the spectrum. Red light is the only light that is reflected from the shirt. But if you went into a room that projected blue light,with the red shirt on,  it would look black because the blue would be absorbed and no red light could be reflected.

The human eye has retina's and that contains two types of photoreceptors, rods and cones. The cones can detect colour and the rods can only let us see things in black, white and grey. Our cones only work when we have enough light, but not when light is dim. Its why we see greys and cannot see colours at night when the light is dim. 

I found out through research that our eyes developed the ability to see the full colour spectrum of visible light, except UV, around 30 million years ago. I also found out about an animal, a shrimp of all things that can see a crazy amount of colour! I found it kinda interesting.

Colour Contrast

There are 7 types of colour contrast 

Complementary 

Hue

Light & Dark 

Cold & Warm

Simultaneous

Saturation

Contrast of Extension

We started In class by looking at complementary colour, we did this by looking at and made the colour wheel.

The colour wheel is split into 12 sections.

Primary colours

Red

Blue

Yellow

Secondary colours

Green 

Orange

Purple

( These are made from mixing the two primary colours in ether side of the wheel)

Tertiary colours

Vermillion

Amber

Chartreuse

Teal

Violet 

Magenta

(These are made by mixing the primary and secondary colours on ether side of the wheel) 

Complimentary colours are colours opposite each other on the colour wheel, for example Red and Green. When combined they cancel each other out and produce a grey colour than can be turned into a scale by adding black or white. 

When placed next to each other they create the strongest contrast, this was used in impressionist paintings.

Vincent van Gogh Farms near Auvers 1890 

I have done more examples and experiments of complimentary colour in my sketch book. I will continue to explore the other colour contrasts in separate blog posts.