My colleague at the University of Leeds, Dr Vien Chueng, who is currently President of the International Colour Association (AIC) recently published this article through the University of Leeds on the influence and impact of colour on the way we live. This is part of a series of articles from the University that address our transformational research and collaborations that are helping tackle global challenges and advancing knowledge to create a better future.
Category Archives: knowledge
Colour Mixing
I really like this page by John Lovett about colour mixing.
We all know that you can’t mix all colours by starting from three primaries. You can’t do this in theory and you can’t do it in practice. You can’t do it with additive colour mixing and you can’t do it with subtractive mixing. In fact, with subtractive mixing, the oft-cited primaries of red, yellow and blue are actually not a very good choice.
Mixing red and blue pigments, for example, won’t give you a great purple. You will lose saturation and you almost certainly won’t get the vivid purple that is suggested by many colour wheels. However, John Lovett’s page explains how, if you do start with red, yellow and blue, you can do a little better by understanding that there is not just one blue and one red, for example. If you want to mix yellow and blue you should use a greenish yellow and a grreenish blue. On the other hand, if you want to mix blue and red you should use a reddish blue and a bluish red. This reduces the loss in saturation.
However, although Lovett’s advice is superb, you still can’t make all of the colours this way (though you can make all the hues of course). And arguably what Lovett is proposing is a six-primary system rather than a three-primary system. Lovett ends up proposing a six-primary system in an attempt to make the out-dated idea of RYB work.
A route to better colour knowledge
I have been providing free information about colour on the internet since … well, almost since the internet existed! My posts here on colourchat have received over 300,000 views from more than 200,000 people. But before I ran this blog I ran something called an FAQ. FAQs were on the internet long before blogs and my colour physics FAQ was available for free for decades, providing free information about colour measurement to anyone who was interested. I have also contributed to TheConversation and my post there the effect of colour on our bodies and minds is the 7th most read article on TheConversation by anyone at the University of Leeds with about 170,000 reads. I am passionate about colour education and I am part of the colour literacy project.
Recently I had the idea to generate even better content that can educate about colour and to this end I started a patreon page. For some of this content I am charging a couple of dollars per month for access. But the idea is to generate some funds to allow the highest quality colour education material to be developed. That’s my dream anyway. If you would like to support me doing this – and also see the material that is being developed – please think about supporting me at the patreon website.
Whatever happens I will continue to keep this Colourchat resource free and will post here as often as I can.
Newton and Prisms
What I love about colour is the fact that there is always something new to learn. Today I learned that the experiment with two prisms (often attributed to Newton) where he split white light with one prism and recombined it with a second (inverted) prism is not possible. There is a fantastic youtube video about this that shows that you need a lens between the two prisms to make this work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uucYGK_Ymp0
Red and Green make Yellow
Episode 4 of our colour podcast has just gone live. You can listen to it here.
Colour on Instagram
Recently I had the idea of trying to teach the basics of colour theory using Instagram.
The idea is to keep the messages really clear and simple and combine them with colourful imagery.
You can see this on my Instagram account @colourchat.
I was inspired to do this after watching what GothamChess was doing on Instagram to teach some simple – and not so simple – ideas about chess. Who would have thought it? From chess theory to colour theory.
Does Red Make the Heart Beat Faster?
We had a lot of fun with our third colour podcast. We started off talking about the colour vision of unicorns and my co-presenter Huw put forward a very entertaining suggestion of what their colour vision would be like if they existed. We then explored the effect of colour and light on health. The effect of colour on heart rate and blood pressure is still contentious which is extraordinary, I think after all of these years that the scientific community has been studying colour. We also spoke about the role of colour and light on sleep. Sleep is really really important. Watching this TED talk by Matthew Walker about sleep might be the most important thing that you watch this year.
When Did Humans First See Colour?
In our second colour podcast we chat about how long human colour vision has been the way it has. When did we first colour? How long have we even been human?
Can Dogs See Colour?
Our first colour podcast was all about animal colour vision. Can dogs see colour? Are bulls enraged by the colour red? Can they even see it? And which animals have even better colour vision than we do. You can list to this short podcast here.
Colour Literacy Project
I am really excited to be part of the team of people who just launched the Colour Literacy Project – for further details see https://colourliteracy.org/
I started teaching my own multi-disciplinary approach to colour at Leeds University in about 2005 as I became frustrated with the way that traditional colour theory was being taught and how it was often presented in textbooks. Over the last few years I have discovered I am not alone. I found out that Luanne Stovall (https://www.luannestovall.com/) and Robin Kingsburgh (http://robinkingsburgh.com/colour-literacy-project) were doing something similar in their universities. And it was a pleasure to come across the fantastic resources of David Briggs for whom I have the highest regard – you can see his brilliant resource here – http://www.huevaluechroma.com/. I first became introduced to these people through Maggie Maggio (https://maggiemaggio.com/color/) who came to Leeds a year or so away and gave a brilliant and inspiring colour workshop. So it turns out that I am not the only one who is frustrated with the way that traditional colour theory is often presented and taught. However, with the Colour Literacy Project – supported by both ISCC (https://iscc.org/) and AIC (https://aic-color.org/) – we hope to change the way the world views colour in the 21st Century one step at a time. You can get involved to by visiting the Colour Literacy Project website.