Colour Theory
Colour Theory
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Colour theories are A way to give a general structure to the way that designers colour things. It can be broken into many parts. This research task will go over a few of the major parts.
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The Colour Wheel
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The colour wheel is a circle of colour that is based on red, yellow, and blue, the three primary colours. The first iteration of a wheel of colours was created by Sir Isaac Newton in 1666 and has been altered and fine-tuned over the course of time to become the colour wheel we know today. There are categories based on certain colour wheels too. Some examples include but are not limited to:
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Primary Colours (Red, Blue, Yellow): Primary Colours are the colours that cannot be mixed or formed by the combinations of any other colours. Every other colour can be formed from these three in one way or another.
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Secondary Colours (Orange, Purple, Green): This colour wheel displays the colours obtained by mixing the primary colours. It shows the first example of “complementary colours”. Complementary colours fall under “colour harmony”.
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Tertiary Colours: (Yellow-orange, Red-orange, Red-purple, Blue-purple, Blue-green, Yellow-green): These colours are introduced by mixing a primary colour with a secondary colour, hence the two word name. This introduces more “complementary colours” on the wheel.
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Colour Harmony
Colour harmony is when colours are arranged in a pleasing manner. It makes the viewer immersed with a sense of order and keeps them engaged. If colour harmony is not followed, it could make the image seem boring or chaotic. This could cause it to be too overwhelming, displeasing or just generally uninteresting to the viewer. This is because “The human brain rejects what it cannot organize and what it cannot understand” and “The human brain will reject under-stimulating information”. In short, the goal should be to reach a healthy balance of stimulation, not too much, and not too little. There are multiple formulas for colour harmony:
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A colour scheme based on analogous colours: A colour scheme that takes three colours that next to each other on a 12-part colour wheel, one of these colours usually dominates the design and the others are used for small highlights or subtle parts of the design.
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A colour scheme based on complementary colours: Complementary colours are any two colours that are directly opposite each other in a colour wheel, this creates the maximum amount of contrast you can obtain with one colour or the other. This can be combined with analogous colours to get more than two colours in a character design, whilst still maintaining the previously mentioned “sense of order”.
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A colour scheme based on triadic colours: Triadic colours are any three colours that are evenly spaced around the colour wheel. This type of colour scheme can be rather difficult to manage if you’re using saturated colours, as it covers an immensely large part of the colour wheel, so contrast can be slightly hard to manage. One way to handle this is to use one dominant colour and let the other two support it in the form of highlights on the design. Alternatively, you could try mixing the three with whites, as white is quite a universal colour.
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A colour scheme based on nature: Nature provides a “perfect departure point” in terms of colour harmony, for example, a plant could have a red flower which would contrast with the natural greens of the rest of the plant, creating a harmonious design whilst not following a technical formula.
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Colour Emotion
Colour emotion is simple, certain colours are used to invoke certain emotions or messages in a viewer, and certain colours have universal emotions tied to them. Here is a list of basic examples:
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Colour Context
Colour context is how a colour seems to behave in relation to other colours. The main way that colour context affects how a colour is perceived is when a colour is placed upon another. For example, if red were to be placed on black or turquoise, the colour would appear very brilliant, but if it were to be placed on white, it would appear dull, and if it were to appear on orange, it would appear lifeless. It would also appear larger on black in comparison to other colours. You can also get different readings of the same colour, for example, you could put purple on a less saturated purple and the same purple also on a slightly reddish, more saturated purple, and the one on the reddish purple would appear redder than the one on the desaturated purple, despite being the same colour. This example displays this quite nicely:
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In conclusion, colour theory (whilst not limited to) is heavily reliant on these theories, and should make use of the colour wheel, colour harmony, colour emotion and colour context.
Bibliography
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Basic Colour Theory – By Color Matters (No exact author) (2022) – (Accessed online at https://www.colormatters.com/color-and-design/basic-color-theory on 15/02/22)
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