VOCABULARY

 

Color Names

12 Chromatic Colors: YELLOW, YELLOW/ORANGE, ORANGE, ORANGE/RED, RED, RED/VIOLET, VIOLET, BLUE/VIOLET, BLUE, BLUE/GREEN, GREEN, YELLOW/GREEN

 

3 Achromatic colors: GREY, WHITE, BLACK

 

Subtractive color synthesis is the creation of color by mixing colors of pigment. Additive color synthesis is the creation of color by mixing colors of light.

 

A primary color is a color that cannot be made from a combination of any other colors. A secondary color is a color created from a combination of two primary colors. Tertiary color is a combination of three colors (primary or secondary).

 

Tints (adding white) and shades (adding black): Use opaque for tint/shades. Transparent will affect the shade depending on your paper color.

 

SEVEN CONTRASTS

Johannes Itten defines seven kinds of color contrast: Contrast of hue, light-dark contrast, cold-warm contrast, complementary contrast, simultaneous contrast, contrast of saturation, and contrast of extension. We speak of contrast when distinct differences can be perceived between two compared effects.

 

Simultaneous Contrast relates to the afterimage. This contrast in color theory recognizes the fact that our eyes will always account for the complementary of a hue even when it is not present. Using this particular contrast can cleverly fool our cognitive perception, and speak directly to the fact that our eyes attempts to resolve the color we experience instantaneously. After Image: Goethe recognized that strong hues tend to generate an impression of their complementary color in the surrounding field, like a contrasting halo. The same effect arises in the afterimage produced when one stares at a color for long moments and then looks away.

 

Complementary contrast describes an increase of visual consonance of any hue if it is paired with its complementary hue. Red paired with green will excite each other in a mutual way by virtue of the way in which we perceive them.

 

Light / dark contrast is understood by a color’s relative light or darkness measured by color theorists with the term value. Naturally, white and black mark the furthest extent of this particular contrast. Yellow and violet mark the furthest hue extent of light/dark contrast (white and black are not hues).

Warm and cold advancing and retiring colors find their extremes with red-orange and green-blue. Proven with both human and animal experiments, blue-green slows down circulation and red-orange stimulates it.

 

Saturation Contrast relates to the degree of purity to a hue. This is some times called chroma. Chroma, measured radially from the center of each slice, represents the “purity” of a color (related to saturation), with lower chroma being less pure (more washed out, as in pastels. Note that there is no intrinsic upper limit to chroma. Different areas of the color space have different maximal chroma coordinates. For instance light yellow colors have considerably more potential chroma than light purples, due to the nature of the eye and the physics of color stimuli.

 

Red, Blue, and Yellow mark the perfect contrast of hue for those working with pigment. They are completely distinct whose effect is always strongly resonant. All other hues exist as combinations of these three. Secondary hues favor neither red, blue, nor yellow colors and are therefore less resonant.

Contrast through extension defines at what quantitative proportion between two or more colors may be said to be in balance. Darker hues should occupy a larger area than those hues that are lighter.

 

COLOR SCHEMES

• Monochromatic: Using any tint, tone, or shade of just one color.

• Analogous Color: Using colors that are adjacent to each other on the color wheel. A typical analogous color scheme should not contain more than three or four colors or you jeopardize harmony. Use a variety of values, intensities, and arrangements to develop interest. One of the easiest ways to obtain interest in analogous color schemes is to place emphasis on a dominant hue. Some ways to make a particular hue dominant is to give it a large area, a darker value, or make it the most intense color.

• Split-analogous color: An analogous color scheme includes a main color and the two colors one space away from it on each side of the color wheel. An example is red, violet, and blue.

• Complementary: Using two colors directly opposite each other on the wheel.

• Split Complementary: Using any color with two colors on each side of its complement. (e.g. Green, with violet and green.)

 

FOR MORE INFORMATION

• Alves, Bill. “Digital Harmony of Sound and Light.” Computer Music Journal 29:4

(Winter 2005): 45-54.

• Ball, Philip. Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color. Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 2001.

• Bishop, Bainbridge. A Souvenir of the Color Organ with Some Suggestions in Regard to

the Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light. New Russia: 1893.

• Bleicher, Steven. Contemporary Color Theory and Use. Clifton Park, NY: Thomson

Delmar Learning, 2005.

• Hahl-Koch, Jelena trans., John C Crawford. Arnold Schoenberg Wassily Kandinsky:Letters, Pictures, and Documents. London: Faber and Faber, 1984.

• Itten, Johannes. The Art of Color. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1961.

____________. The Elements of Color. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company,

1970.

• Kaplan, Frances. Art Science & Art Therapy: Reprinting the Picture. Great Britain:

Athenaeum Press, 2000.

• Kharkhurin, Anatoliy V. Is Triangle Really Yellow? 

• Kuehni, Rolf G and Adreas Schwarz. Color Ordered: A Survey of Color Order Systems

from Antiquity to the Present. Cary, NC: Oxford University Press, 2007.

• Kuehni, Rolf G. An Introduction to Practice and Principles, John Wiley & Sons Inc:

2005.

• Lamb, Trevor, Lanine Bourriau. Colour: Art & Science. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1995.

• Licht, Alan. Sound Art. New York: Rizzoli International Publications Inc, 2007.

Lee, David Webster. Nature’s Palette: The Science of Plant Color. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2007.

• MacLaury, Robert E, Galina V. Paramei, Don Dedrick. Anthropology of Color:

Interdisciplinary Multilevel Modeling. Amsterdam: NLD John Benjamin’s

Publishing Company, 2007.

• Newman, William R. Atoms and Alchemy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,

2010.

• Proctor, John, Susan Proctor. Color in Plants and Flowers: The Mysterious and

Sometimes Capricious Way in Which Nature Uses Colors in Plants for Survival.

New York: Everest House Publishers, 1978.