Comments on: History of the Color Wheel

By: Charley Parker

Charley Parker — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:09:59 +0000

Thanks, Michael.

Quite a compliment coming from you.

Other readers should click immediately over to Michael’s fascinating an illuminating blog Articles and Texticles to see what you’ve been missing.

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:26:02 +0000

This post sums up perfectly the reasons why I admire your writing so much, Charley. Sober and coolly analytical, you sift the truffles from the puffballs, and lay out the beckoning pathways for your visitors to continue their learning journey. Thanks!

By: Robert Tracy

Robert Tracy — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 20:09:10 +0000

And see John Sloan’s take on this. His, to my mind, beats all.

It’s not a color wheel–rather a triangle. It’s detailed to the artist’s actual colors, e.g., a primary might be Cobalt Blue. But he takes it further. He goes into the secondary and tertiary colors. I’ve found it extremely valuable.

By: jan tuitman

jan tuitman — Wed, 14 May 2008 23:00:53 +0000

what i find very fascinating is that color perception in the human eye is based on seperating the perception into three different primary colors (or wavelengths), whereas the brain seems to translate these three color signals again into an opponent based model, where there are only two dimensions for color and one for black/white.
It looks as if in evolution we first had one receptive system, and then another one added on top of it. There are many fascinating books written about color theory.

And by the way, did you know that Goethe considered himself also to be a color scientist? He considered his color theories to be some of his most important works(!). His theory is a bit odd, but highly romantic: colors come to existence by a battle between dark and light. He points out some funny inconsistencies in Newtons theory, that were overlooked for quite a long time.

By: oakling

oakling — Tue, 13 May 2008 23:21:58 +0000

I learned so much here today! I always wondered about that purple-to-red bit too. But I figured that magenta and fuschia were the missing links.

By: Sarah Lowengard

Sarah Lowengard — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:43:03 +0000

My colleague Rolf Kuehni has recently issued a translation of Otto Phillip Runge’s 1810 Farben-Kugel (color ball). I understand this is the first translation into English. For more information see
http://rolfkuehni.com/Page2.html.

By: Charley Parker

Charley Parker — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:48:33 +0000

Thanks, David!

I’ve added an correction and addendum to the main post.

By: David Briggs

David Briggs — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:40:14 +0000

On your question about where the circular arrangement comes from, I believe it is explained by the opponent model of vision, which postulates processing of colour information into a redness vs greenness and a yellowness vs blueness channel. These two channels create a 360 degree range of possible combinations. Wavelengths of visible light can create all of these possible combinations except for a range in the positive redness/positive blueness sector, which can only be generated with mixtures. I’ve tried to explain the idea with a little flash animation on this page:

http://www.huevaluechroma.com/032.php

The threefold nature of the additive primaries then comes from the fact that if we have three lights, each stimulating one of the three cone types more than the other two, we can generate any combination of positive or negative redness vs greenness and yellowness vs blueness values.

One little correction - Mayer does not precede Newton!

Congratulations on your outstanding blog,

David Briggs

By: Charley Parker

Charley Parker — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:20:21 +0000

Thanks, Nita.

Other readers should check out Nita Leland’s Exploring Color and Creativity, which also contains a number of articles and references to information on color.

By: Nita

Nita — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:10:50 +0000

I love this post, Charley. Thanks for the links. I’m going to mention it in my blog today.