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Color Theory Overview and History

Color theory refers to the visual impact of color, the way colors mix and how we

perceive color through organizing color space.

The earliest reference to color theory is thought to be written by

Leone Battista Alberti in 1435. Leonardo da Vinci also refers to color theory in his

journals in the late 1400s. Color theory during this time revolves around the idea that

there are three primaries colors - red, blue, and yellow - and that these three colors,

when mixed together in specific ways create all other colors. This early Renaissance

idea of color was how artist viewed and thought about color up until the mid to late

1600’s and early 1700’s when the age of Enlightenment brought in new scientific

discoveries and experiments with optics. During the Enlightenment in Europe there was

an explosion of color theory ideas. Philosophers of the late 17th and 18th centuries

were obsessed with light and sight. Descartes wrote a treatise on optics, as did Newton.

Newton’s Color Theory, ca. 1665

Newton’s rainbow forms the familiar ROYGBIV because he thought the range of visible

colors should be analogous to the seven-note scale.

Sir Isaac Newton developed the first color wheel when he expanded the theory in his

1704 work, Opticks. Around 1665, when Isaac Newton first passed white light through a

prism and watched it fan out into a rainbow, he identified seven constituent colors—red,

orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet—not necessarily because that’s how

many hues he saw, but because he thought that the colors of the rainbow were

analogous to the notes of the musical scale. Naming seven colors to correspond to

seven notes is “a kind of very strange and interesting thing for him to have done,”

says Peter Pesic, physicist, pianist, and author of the 2014 book Music and the Making

of Modern Science. “It has no justification in experiment exactly; it just represents

something that he’s imposing upon the color spectrum by analogy with music.”

Of his rainbow experiment Newton wrote that he had projected white light through a

prism onto a wall and had a friend mark the boundaries between the colors, which

Newton then named. In his diagrams, which showed how colors corresponded to notes,

Newton introduced two colors—orange and indigo—corresponding to half steps in the

octatonic scale. Whether Newton’s friend delineated indigo and orange on the wall or

whether Newton added those colors to his diagrams in order to better fit his analogy is

unclear, Pesic says. In any case, Newton’s inclusion of those two colors had lasting

consequences, Pesic wrote in his book: “For those who came after, Newton’s musical

analogy is the source of the widely held opinion that orange and indigo are actually

intrinsic in the spectrum, despite the great difficulty (if not impossibility) of distinguishing

indigo from blue, or orange from yellow, in spectra.”

Although Newton’s color-music analogy falls apart, his prism experiments showed that

white light is actually a mix of different-colored lights, and this work was “a crucial step

toward understanding the nature of light more deeply,” Pesic says. And even if you can’t

make out indigo in the rainbow, you probably know ROY-G-BIV, which Pesic calls “a

conventional expression of (and homage to) Newton’s choice [to name seven colors in

analogy to music]—even though almost everyone has forgotten or did not know the odd

story of its origin.” 1

1 Newton’s Color Theory Ca. 1665 By Ashley b. Taylor, The Scientist Feb. 28, 2017

An illustration of Sir Isaac Newton’s color wheel. Newton identified seven constituents’ colors—red,

orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet—not necessarily because that’s how many hues he saw,

but because he thought that the colors of the rainbow were analogous to the notes of the musical scale.

The musical notes are: A, B, C, D, E ,F, and G.

Color theory during the 18th and early 19th century expanded into the sensory and

psychological effects of color. Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749 -1832) developed a color

wheel that described the psychological effect of each color. Blues give a feeling of

coolness while yellows create a feeling of warmth. Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810)

combines the objective reason of the 18th century Enlightenment with the subjective

intuition of 19th century Romanticism. Goethe initiated his theory with a critique of the

dominant color theory of the time: Newton’s Optics (1704). His was the first

experimental proof of Galileo’s thesis, in which light was supposed to be “in reality”

something mechanical and therefore quantifiable and a measurable phenomenon.

A century later, Goethe argued color was not solely a physical phenomenon, existing

only as a measurable property within light. Color was not a segment within light, but a

product of the harmonious mixture of light and dark. “Color itself is a degree of

darkness,” and all color is half-light. As he concludes, the color spectrum is not the

splitting of light but the convergence of lightness and darkness.

Goethe's color wheel, below, from Theory of Color, illustrates his chapter on

"Allegorical, symbolic, and mystical use of color."

Goethe’s Color Wheel

The color wheel was one among many forms—which often presented contrasting

theories, like that of Jacques-Fabien Gautier, who argued that black and white were

primary colors. But the wheel, and Newton’s basic ideas about it, have endured almost

unchanged to today.

Here are some 18th century color wheels showing the variations of thought on color

theory and organization.

Color wheel draw and painted by entomologist, Ignaz Schiffermüller

British entomologist Moses Harris from 1776 shows Newton’s 7-color scheme simplified

to the 6 primary and secondary colors we usually see, arranged in the complementary

and analogous scheme, with tertiary gradations between them.

Color is always representative. Newton’s original wheel included “musical notes

correlated with color.” By the end of the 18th century, color theory had become

increasingly tied to psychological theories and typologies. Goethe and Friedrich Schiller

designed a color wheel in 1789 to illustrate “human occupations and character traits,”

including “tyrants, heroes, adventurers, hedonists, lovers, poets, public speakers,

historians, teachers, philosophers, pedants, rulers,” grouped into the four temperaments

of humoral theory.

Goethe and Friedrich Schiller’s Color Wheel of Human Occupations and Character traits

Goethe and Friedrich Schiller’s Color Spheres

It’s a fairly short leap from these psychologies of color to those used by advertisers and

commercial designers in the 20th century—or from the artists and scientists’ color

theories to abstract expressionism, the Bauhaus school, and the chemists and

photographers who recreated the colors of the world on film.

Blues give a feeling of coolness while yellows create a feeling of warmth. For Interior

Designers, the psychological effects of color are a key component when choosing

interior finishes. In the early and mid 20th century, color theorists expanded color theory

to include color as it relates to pigments -inks, dyes, and paints, rather than light. There

are more variants when dealing with pigments because pigments may vary in hue,

value, and chroma. Hue referring to the actual color - red, blue, or orange, value

referring to the lightness or darkness of a color, and chroma referring to the intensity of

a color. These color theories are still in place today and still refer to red, blue, and

yellow as the primary colors.

These color theories are still in place today and still refer to red, blue, and yellow as the

primary colors. In the early 20th century Color Science Albert Munsell, who was born in

Boston Massachusetts and attended and served on the faculty of Massachusetts

Normal Art School (known today as Mass College of Art and Design) was an American

painter and art teacher who developed the Munsell Color System. Which is one of the

first Color Order Systems that is still used today in industrial design and other industries

such as car manufacturing. The Munsell color system is a color space that specifies

colors based on three properties of color: hue, value (lightness), and chroma (color

purity). It was created by Professor Albert H. Munsell in the first decade of the 20th

century and adopted by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) as the

official color system for soil research in the 1930s.

Several earlier color order systems had placed colors into a three-dimensional color

solid of one form or another, but Munsell was the first to separate hue, value, and

chroma into perceptually uniform and independent dimensions, and he was the first to

illustrate the colors systematically in three-dimensional space. Munsell's system,

particularly the later re-notations, is based on rigorous measurements of human

subjects' visual responses to color, putting it on a firm experimental scientific basis.

Because of this basis in human visual perception, Munsell's system has outlasted its

contemporary color models, and though it has been superseded for some uses by

models such as CIELAB (L*a*b*) and CIECAM02, it is still in wide use today.

The system consists of three independent properties of color which can be

represented cylindrically in three dimensions as an irregular color solid:

• hue, measured by degrees around horizontal circles

• chroma, measured radially outward from the neutral (gray) vertical axis

• value, measured vertically on the core cylinder from 0 (black) to 10 (white)

Munsell determined the spacing of colors along these dimensions by taking

measurements of human visual responses. In each dimension, Munsell colors are as

close to perceptually uniform as he could make them, which makes the resulting shape

quite irregular. As Munsell explains:

“Desire to fit a chosen contour, such as the pyramid, cone, cylinder or cube, coupled

with a lack of proper tests, has led to many distorted statements of color relations, and it

becomes evident, when physical measurement of pigment values and chromas is

studied, that no regular contour will serve.”

— Albert H. Munsell, “A Pigment Color System and Notation”

In the Munsell color system there 10 hues instead of 12 that move through color space

using a fractional system. Color is organized by its hue (color), value (light to dark), and

chroma (the intensity of a color). A simple number system was assigned to both the

value and chroma of all the hues in the Munsell color wheel. This made identifying color

exactly very easy and was one reason that industries such as care manufacturing

started to use this system. It made color matching easy and accurate.

Munsell Color System Chart

Diagram of the Munsell Color System

Munsell Color System

This section is an overview of color theory and terms

The three dimensions of color:

Hue: The term “hue” refers to pigment in the realm of color theory. This technically

defined as “the degree to which a stimulus can be described as similar to or different

from stimuli that are described as red, green, blue, and yellow.” Hue can essentially be

thought of as the basic color, tint, or shade as defined by the color wheel.

Value: Value is synonymous with “lightness” when used in regard to color theory. This

is a representation of variation in the perception of a color’s overall brightness.

If the hue of a color is “blue”, then the value determines if the color description could be

“light blue” (high value) or “dark blue” (low value).

Chroma: Chroma, commonly referred to as “saturation”, refers to the perceived

intensity of a specific color along the color wheel. A higher chroma will result in greater

“colorfulness” or richness of the color as perceived by the end user. Lower chroma thus

results in a more subtle, dull color.

Primary Colors: Red, Yellow, and Blue: In classical color theory, primary colors are

the three hues that cannot be formed by any combination of other colors. Thus, the

defining element of primary colors is that they cannot be created by combining any

other pigments on the color wheel. That said the use of the word primary does not mean

they are absolute. You can’t mix white nor a good black with the red, yellow and blue.

The word primary is subjective in context to color space and the visual world it is used

to illustrate.

Secondary Colors: Green, Orange, and Violet: Used in design and color theory just

as often as primary colors, secondary colors can be created by mixing two primary

colors together.

Tertiary Colors: There are six main tertiary colors on the modern color wheel. As

defined by modern color theory, these are yellow-orange, red-orange, red-purple, blue-

purple, blue-green & yellow-green. Each tertiary color has a hyphenated name because

they are created by mixing one primary and one secondary color together.

Color Harmony: With an understanding of essential terms and the various hues

defined by the color wheel, we can begin to employ color harmoniously. In color theory,

harmony refers to different color combinations that can be utilized in an aesthetically

pleasing manner. This is where color theory is finally put into practice through design

and composition. You may have heard the term “complementary colors” before.

However, this should not be confused with the idea of colors that “compliment” each

other well. In color theory, “complementary” is a specific term referring to combined

hues used in a design scheme.

Complementary Colors: A design with complementary colors employs two pigments

that are directly opposite each other on the color wheel. By using two colors with the

greatest visual contrast, each hue is made more vivid as a result. This simple form of

color harmony is the most commonly understood in color theory and widely used in

visual composition. A subset of complementary color harmony is the “split-

complementary” design. In contrast to complementary colors, this color scheme is

defined by one of the two contrasting hues being split into analogous colors for greater

color variation.

Triadic Colors: Color triads use three colors that are equidistant to one another on the

color wheel. These designs are more complex than complementary colors but are

based on the same principle. By employing 3 hues that are farthest away from each

other on the color wheel, a striking visual contrast is created. Examples of color triads

include primary colors and secondary colors.

Analogous Colors: Are colors that are next to each other on the color wheel.

Or related color harmonies, are defined by the implementation of one main “root” color

and two or more colors that are close in proximity on the color wheel. This is a very

basic and reliable way to create a visually appealing composition. Furthermore,

analogous color designs can be combined with complementary colors and a myriad of

other harmonies for diverse chromatic effects.

12 section color wheel