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Notes

Color-

  • Perhapes the most appealing of all the design elements.
  • It has been called the music of the visual arts. Color suggests a mood and depth of experience beyond those possible with other design elements.
  • Color is both art and science.
  • Psychologists explain the abstract theories of color and its relationship to light, as well as the optical principles involved in color sinsation.

Color and Light-

  • Without light there can be no color.
  • Things we identify as being red, green, or orange are not innately those colors.
  • We perceive them as being red, green, or orange because of the way our brains interpret the message transmitted by our eyes.
  • The dynamics of color are not yet fully understood, but we do know that color is actually produced by light as it is broken down into electromagnetic vibrations.
  • Greek philosophers asserted that color is not a physical property but a matter of perception, it was not until 1666 that Isaac Newton produced scientific evidence of the fact.
  • Newton directed a beam of sunlight into a glass prism.
  • Glass is denser than air, the light was tefracted, or bent, as it passed through the prism.
  • Newton did not expect the light to be dispersed into colors as it left the prism.
  • Short waves in the light were refracted more and long waves less.
  • As they emeraged from the prism they arranged themselves systematically into the colors of the rainbow: indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red.
  • There is no purple in the natural spectrum but when indigo and red overlap or combine, the result is purple or violet. 
  • Color is basically sunlight and further that in light all colors mixed together result in white.
  • Impressionlist printers of the late nineteenth century sought to divorce art from intellectual interpretations, to paint what we actually see than what we think we see.

 

Author: AMANDA L WALDECK
Last modified: 9/3/2009 9:52 AM (EST)