Colour is life

It’s Wednesday, which means colour theory class tonight. It’s a lot of work, but it’s fun and interesting and I’m learning lots of great stuff about colour. And I really like my teacher — she just oozes passion for colour :-)

Our first project was to create a colour wheel. OK, so it isn’t exactly round, but it’s close!!

Did you know that Sir Isaac Newton is credited with inventing the colour wheel in 1706? The colour wheel is a visual representation of twelve colours arranged by their chromatic (colour) relationships:

The three colour families on the wheel are (from left to right) Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary.

     

Primary: Blue, red, and yellow. These colours are at their basic essence — they cannot be created by mixing other colours.

Secondary: Purple, orange, and green. These colours are created by mixing two primary colours at a 50/50 ratio — or in the case of these cauliflowers, by decades of traditional selective breeding ;-)

Tertiary: Blue-purple, red-purple, red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, and blue-green. These colours are created by mixing one primary colour and one secondary colour at a 50/50 ratio.

And that’s just the start!! There are so many fascinating things to learn about colour —how we perceive colour, why we react to colours and colour combinations the way we do, how colours interact with each other… it would take a lifetime to learn it all. In fact, a lot of what we know about colour today we learned from people who actually did dedicate a large portion of their lives to studying colour.

If you want to learn more about colour with weekly blog colour lessons, leave a comment and let me know. I’d love to share what I’m learning in my colour theory class with you :-)

Colour wheels from Worqx.com