GRC 200 Understanding Color

What was Josef Albers credited with saying?

"In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is — as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art."

Who is Johannes Itten?

(1888-1967) who was a member of the Bauhaus, a highly influential German art and design school. He was a Swiss color and art theorist who developed color combinations and modified the color wheel. Itten's color wheel is based on the primary triad of red, yellow and blue and includes twelve hues. He studied color in terms of both design and science and delved into psychological and spiritual aspects of color. His theories still form the core of most art school color information.

In the early ________ century acrylic paint, a water-based, non-toxic, and quick drying medium, opened up the market even further.

20th

________________________ colors are created by light.

Additive

___________ absorbs all colors equally and reflects none, so it appears ___________ to us. While artists consider __________ a color, scientists do not because __________ is the absence of all color.

Black, black, black, black

What is the difference between CMYK and RGB color?

CMYK is used for printing and RGB for web

the ___________ ____________ has the pure colors around the equator (showing the colors of the color wheel) while white on the top and black on the bottom form the sphere's poles. The colors get lighter above the equator as they move to the top. From the equator down, they get darker.

Color Sphere

When the primary colors Red, Green and Blue overlap, they mix to create ________, ___________ and _______________.

Cyan, Magenta, Yellow

Who is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe?

Goethe (German) was another theorist who worked with pigments, not optics. Goethe disagreed with Newton's conclusions about color. He felt that a scientific approach alone did not enable one to fully understand color. Human perception of color, rather than just the physics of light, allowed him to discover important aspects of color theory, including color's relationship to emotion. He divided all colors into two groups. Warm Colors (red-orange-yellow) and Cool colors (green-blue-violet). Warm colors produced excitement in viewers and cool colors created unsettled feelings. Below is an image of Goethe's color wheel.

Who is Isaac Newton?

In 1665, he was a young scientist studying at Cambridge University in Englad. He was interested in learning about light and colors. One bright sunny day, Newton darkened his room and made a hole in his window shutter, allowing just one beam of sunlight to enter the room. He then took a glass prism and placed it in the sunbeam. The result was a spectacular multicolored band of light just like a rainbow. His experiment was proof that white light is not really white. It is a combination of different colors.

_________________ light has a longer wavelength than red light and while humans can't see this light, they can feel the heat ________ generates.

Infrared, infrared

_____________ _____________ took the 7 colors of the spectrum and bent them around in a circle to create the first color wheel and he identified the 7 colors in the spectrums as:

Isaac Newton 1. Red 2. Orange 3. Yellow 4. Green 5. Blue 6. Indigo 7. Violet

Who is considered the father of color theory?

Josef Albers, who studied under Itten, also taught a the Bauhaus and later at Yale University.

What is light made of?

Light is made of electromagnetic waves and these waves spread out from any light source, such as the sun. Light waves travel at tremendous speed (186,000 miles or 300,000 kilometers per second). Each of the colors that make white light have different wavelengths.

___________________ colors can't be created by the mixing of other colors. They are any of a group of colors from which all other colors can be made.

Primary

_________ __________ _________color tree depicts saturation. He placed Hue around the equator, Value is at the center and gets lighter on top, and darker on the bottom. Chroma (saturation) is along the equator and is more saturated on the outside then becomes less saturated (more dull) as it moves inward toward the spine. In the image below, there is a diagram of hue, value and chroma. Chroma goes from 12 to 0 - 12 being the highest or most saturated. Value goes from 0 to 10. 10 being the lightest (on top).

Professor Albert Munsell's

What is the abbreviation for the 7 colors of the color spectrum?

ROYGBIV

_____________ colors are created by mediums such as paint or ink.

Subtractive

_________ _________ Color is used by the print industry.

Subtractive Process

It is called __________ _______ _______ (for printing). Each color represents an ink used on a printing plate used on a printing press. The primary colors (called process colors, CMYK) are Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. Mix Magenta and Cyan to make Blue, Cyan mixed with Yellow makes Green, Yellow and Magenta make Red. Black (in the middle) is more of a muddy black, so printers use a 4th plate with black ink. The K in CMYK stands for Key or Black.

Subtractive Process Color

What is Hue?

The color itself. The position in the visible spectrum or on the color wheel. The section of the wavelength that is reflected back to us. The name of the color. Red is a hue.

Who is Philipp Otto Runge?

The color wheel did not include tints and shades (light and dark colors). To add them, Runge developed the color sphere to help depict tints and shades of the colors on a color wheel.

____________________ ____________ Colors (Artist Colors). are the colors you learned about as a child when coloring or painting. The primary colors are Red, Yellow and Blue. Mixing Red and Blue creates Violet, Blue and Yellow makes Green and Yellow and Red make Orange.

Traditional Subtractive

__________________ light has an even shorter wavelength, but humans can't see it

Ultraviolet

What is value?

Value is the relative lightness or darkness of a color. It is an important tool used to add emphasis and establish visual hierarchy in a composition. The effect value can have on a composition is relative. It is determined by the lightness or darkness of all the other elements within the layout. Value is one of the best ways to achieve contrast in a design.

What does the human eye see?

When light shines on an object, some colors bounce off and others are absorbed due to the molecular structure of the object. Our eyes only seethe colors that are bounced off or reflectedd.

Josef Albers wrote ______________________________.

a book entitled Interaction of Color. This masterwork in twentieth-century art education. Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers's unique ideas of color experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience.

What are the two broad categories of color?

additive, subtractive

rod cells

are more sensitive to light than cone cells and are of only one type. Rods are used for seeing in low light conditions.

Optic nerve

carries signals to the brain

Lens

changes shape to allow the eye to focus on light

Each _________ has an inherent value. Notice yellow is naturally lightest in value. And blue-purple is the darkest value. You can adjust the values of colors to lighten or darken them.

color

Where do we see additive color?

computer monitors, traffic lights, TVs....anything that emits light

Finally, in the 1980's, the ___________ and then _____________ revolutionized how we create and use color.

computer, Photoshop

Although color theory principles first appeared in the writings of Leone Battista Alberti (c.1435) and the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (c.1490 - who noted that certain colors intensify each other, discovering _____________ or _________________ colors), the tradition of "color theory" began in the 18th century.

contrary, complementary

iris

controls the size of the pupil and the amount of light entering the eye

Palettes whose colors lean toward _________ values tend to transmit a more subdued feel.

darker

When the primary colors are mixed ______________, white light is created. This is why it is called additive color.

equally

Albers _______________________ with different arrangements of colored paper. to show how the color looked like it was different - the color changed when placed next to another color. It could become more vibrant or dull.

experimented

Before the industrial age charcoal and other dyes and stains (natural pigments) were used on a variety of surfaces. These pigments were made from miners such as limonite, hematite, red ochre, yellow ochre and umber, charcoal (carbon black) from fires, burnt bones (bone black) and white from grounded calcite (lime white). But the colors had a tendency to ________.

fade

Cone cells

function best in bright light, are concentrated in the center of the retina. There are three kinds of cone cells: red, green and blue. When you see a color each cone sends a distinct signal to the brain.

What are the three properties or characteristics of color?

hue, value, saturation

The ___________ age in the 19th century produced chemically created colors in massive quantities making readily available art materials to the population.

industrial

Where do we see Subtractive Color?

inks, pigments, dyes...anything that reflects light

color theory

is a body of practical guidance to color mixing and the visual effects of a specific color combination.

Retina

light-sensitive lining of the eye

There are also definitions (or categories) of colors based on the color wheel. They are:

primary colors, secondary colors, and tertiary colors

What are the primary colors?

red, green and blue

What is the longest wavelength of light that humans can see and what is the shortest?

red, violet

What is color?

reflected light

Color is ______________.

relative—that is, relative to the light and to the other colors surrounding it. The eye and the brain work in conjunction to compensate for the color of the light on and surrounding an object in order to determine what the color of an object actually is.

The human retina contains cells called _______ and ______ that are sensitive to different colors of light.

rods, cones

___________________ (also called Chroma): the vividness to dullness of a color, richness or purity, or to be more specific, the purity of the hue as determined by the amount of gray it contains. The higher the gray level, the lower the saturation. Although saturation is different than value, it is tied a color's value. When a color's saturation is adjusted, its value will change as well. Below is an example of low chroma and high chroma (low saturation and high saturation). The color is red, but the saturation is lower on the left and higher on the right.

saturation

The multicolored band of light is called a color ___________________ and consists of 7 colors: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet. (Remember the first letter of each color: ROYGBIV).

spectrum

pupil

the adjustable opening in the center of the eye through which light enters

Compositions with a strong presentation of _______ that range from dark to light are especially capable of delivering conveyances of liveliness and action.

values

When ________ light strikes a white sheet of paper, it appears ___________ to us because it absorbs no color and reflects all color equally.

white, white