COLOR THEORY

INCEX

LIGHT

cause of color.

COLORANT

means to use to generate color.

COLORS

considered the effect

ENVIRONMENTAL COLORS

Color that surrounds us at all times, whether the setting is man-made or natural. It is all-encompassing.

GRAPHIC COLORS

Colors of images: painted, drawn, printed, or on screen

TECHNICAL-SCIENTIFIC SYSTEM

The color system which are the province of science and industry. They measure color under specific and limited conditions. Most deal with the colors of light, not the colors of objects.

INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION ON ILLUMINATION

CIE; developed a color triangle that locates the color (in degrees K) of any light source. The CIE color triangle is mathematical and based on the human range of vision.

COLOR RENDERING INDEX

Evaluates the way in which a given light source renders the colors of objects in comparison to a chart of eight standardized colors.

COMMERCIAL COLOR-ORDER SYSTEM

These are systematic arrangements of colors meant to assist the user in making selections from the colors available in a particular product line.

TRUE COLOR SYSTEM

based on a theory of colors and are published as a full range of colors arranged in a visually logical format. They attempt to illustrate all possible colors that can be produced within a specific medium

THE BENJAMIN MOORE COLOR SYSTEM

It includes over 3300 paint colors and offers a computer-matching option to create custom colors that do not appear in the printed collections.

PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM

One of the most widely known commercial color order systems which provides a palette of standardized colors for a wide range of products ranging from printing inks to software, color films, plastics, markers, and color-related tools and products for use by designers and manufacturers.

COLOR COLLECTION

They offer a limited number of colors, often with a theme or point of view, to help the user in making a selection within a single product or group of related products.

INTELLECTUAL-PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM

These systems explore the meaning and organization of color.

HUE

name of color.

VALUE

The relative darkness of lightness of a color

EYE TRAINING

Learning to distinguish in every color sample with the three objective attributes: hue, value and saturation.

SATURATION / CHROMA

The relative brilliance or muted quality of a color.

MUNSELL SYSTEM

A system for specifying colors arranged in three orderly scales of uniform visual steps according to hue, chroma, and value, developed in 1890 by Albert H. Munsell. Hue extends in a rotary direction about a central axis through a spectrum of five major and five secondary hues.

JOSEF ALBERS

A color theorist who taught at the Bauhaus and often described color deceptions in his work, including how one color can look like two. He stressed the power of eye-training exercises.

TONE

A hue muted by gray.

THEORETICAL GRAY

It is a concept used by color theorists to characterize a perfect tertiary color: one of no discernible hue; created by the mixture of any pair of complementary colors.

MUTED COLORS

Colors that are at a low level of saturation.

BRILLIANT COLORS

Colors that have a high level of saturation. It may or may not also be a saturated color.

MONOCHROMATIC VALUE SCALE

It is a single hue illustrated as a full range of values in even steps, including both tints and shades.

TINT

Hues with white added.

SHADE

A hue that has been made darker.

LUMINOUS HUES

It reflects a great deal of light, appears light, and is high in value.

VALUE CONTRAST

This makes objects distinguishable from their background.

BLACK

The lowest possible value.

MIDDLE GRAY

Medium value; neither dark nor light.

WHITE

The highest possible value.

VALUE SCALE

A series of ever-doubling steps that move between the poles of dark and light.

VALUE

It refers to relative light and dark in a sample; a series of steps from black to white.

BLACK AND WHITE

They are achromatic; they are without hue.

CHROMATIC NEUTRALS

An enormous, almost limitless class of colors; defined as "gray or brown, a mixture of two secondaries," which can be said more simply as "gray or brown, a mixture of three primaries."

COMPLEMENTARY COLORS

These are the hues that are opposite one another on the artists' spectrum.

ANALOGOUS COLORS

These are hues adjacent on the artists’ spectrum. These groupings contain two primary colors but never the third. It is are among the most frequently used in design. Also defined as "a group of colors consisting of a primary color, a secondary color, and any and all hues that lie between the two.”

CHROMATIC SCALE

A chromatic scale is any linear series of hues in spectrum order.

WILHELM OSTWALD

He predicated an eight-hue spectrum that includes sea-green (blue-green) and leaf-green (yellow-green).

SATURATED COLOR

A hue in its strongest possible manifestation. i.e. the reddest red imaginable, or the bluest blue are saturated colors. Also called pure colors or full colors.

GREEN, ORANGE, VIOLET

The secondary colors of the artists' spectrum.

RED, YELLOW, BLUE

Primary colors of the artist's spectrum; the simplest hues. They cannot be broken down visually into other colors or reduced into component parts.

ARTIST’S SPECTRUM

A circle that illustrates hues in their natural (spectral) order limited to six or twelve hues. Also known as the color circle or color wheel.

MONOCHROMATIC

Having one hue only

POLYCHROMATIC

Having many hues

ACRHOMETIC

Without hue

CHROMATIC

Having hue

CHROMA

Synonym for hue

ARISTOTLE

The Greek philosopher who attempted to explain the composition of colors and how they were related in De Coloribus, the first known book about color.

DE COLORIBUS

The first known book about color, written by Aristotle. It outlines the theory that all colors (yellow, red, purple, green and blue) are derived from mixtures of black and white.

LEONARDO DA VINCI

Italian painter and sculptor; according to him, black and white were indeed colors. He assigned white, yellow, green, blue, red and black as the simple or primary colors. He concluded that certain responses took place when colors are placed next to each other.

TREATISE ON PAINTING

A book by Leonardo da Vinci, which comprised of his beliefs on color theory.

SIMULTANEOUS CONTRAST

When two different colors come into direct contact, the contrast intensifies the difference between them, changing our perception of these colors.

SIR ISSAC NEWTON

English physicist who was interested purely in the physics of color rather in the perception. He discovered that as a ray of white light passes and is bent, or refracted, through a prism it is broken into an array of 7 colors.

MOSE HARRIS

An English entomologist and engraver who wrote The Natural System of Colors in 1766. Presented red, yellow, and blue as the primitives.

HARRIS WHEEL

Divided into 18 equal hue divisions and each division was then graded by value dark to light; similar to pigment wheel but with more tertiary colors.

JOHAN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

who published Theory of Colors. He was one of the first modern thinkers to investigate and record the function of the eye and its interpretation of color, rather than properties of light.

PHILIPPE OTTO RUNGE

A German painter who wrote The Color Sphere. He arranged twelve hues in a spherical format, thus giving us the first three-dimensional color model.

MICHAEL EUGENECHEVRUEL

The Principle of Harmony and Contrast of Colors. He developed a color wheel based on afterimages.

AFTERIMAGING

It is an optical reaction that occurs after we stare intensely at a hue and then shift our eyes to a white surface, the second hue is called an afterimage.

OGDEN ROODE

American who proposed that colors differed from one another as a result of three variables - purity (saturation), luminosity (value), and hue. His experiments were concerned with the optical mixing that occurs in pointillism.

POINTILISM

A painting technique in which dots of pure hues are placed together on a white ground so that they are mixed by the eye.

ALBERT MUNSELL

Color Notation in 1905.

JOHANNES ITTEN

Swiss teacher and artist probably best known to the color student for his book The Art of Color and its condensed version The Elements of Color. He taught at Bauhaus School and developed his color sphere and star for his Bauhaus preliminary course in 1919.

JOSEF ALBERS

Teacher at the Bauhaus School, he became absorbed with how color reacts and interacts. He often used the triangle as a teaching diagram which had red, yellow and blue at its points. Orange, violet, and green at the midpoints, with red-gray, yellow-gray, and blue-gray in between.

VIOLET

It is the color which the human eyes finds the most difficult to discriminate.

GREEN

This color is the largest color family discernible to the human eye.

JOSEF ALBERS

A teacher at the Bauhaus school who became absorbed with how colors react and interact.

LEONARDO DA VINCI

Who stated that black and white were indeed colors?

LOWER IN VALUE

Colors are generally advancing when they become ___________________.

PRIMARY VALUE

The combination of all ________________ in the light wheel results to white light.

MUDDY BLACK

In the Pigment wheel, when blue, yellow, and red pigments are combined, a ________________ is the result.

SYNETHESIA

It is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary responses in a second sensory cognitive.

WHITE LIGHT

Daylight is also known as:

EXTENSION CONTRAST

This refers to contrast between the proportion of one color area to another. It is also known as proportion.

COMPLEMENTARY CONTRAST

It is the contrast that create two opposite colors on the color wheel, which are complementary.

LIGHT AND DARK CONTRAST

This contrast is the juxtaposition of two colors with different brightness or tonal value.

SATURATION CONTRAST

The type of contrast wherein 100% of color saturation produces a high visual contrast. These colors do not contain any other color.

TEMPERATURE CONTRAST

A type of contrast wherein the difference of temperature the colors increase the visual contrast between the two colors.

HUE CONTRAST

The hue of the color, if it is more or less saturated, this will make the color more live or turned oof. When we are placing a bright color near one without hue, a visual contrast is generated.

COLOR STAR (ART OF COLOR)

Itten's own variation of the Artist color. Used in a different purpose compared to the other color star -basically a different version of the color wheel.

COLOR STAR (ELEMENT OF COLOR)

This is a 2D version of Otto Runge's Color sphere that has been cut apart & Spread out. The Equator consists of pure hues; Inner Circle consist of tints; Outer Circle consist of shades.

PHILIPPE OTTO RUNGE

He created the Color Sphere, where Itten derived his Color Star. He tried to solve the problem of identifying colors by name, so he introduced the first spherical color system in 1810, the first system that take account all 3 attributes of color: HUE, VALUE, SATURATION.

JOHANNES ITTEN

Swiss artist, educator, color theorist, 1888-1967. Taught 1st color course at the Bauhaus. Created the Color Star. Wrote the books "Elements of Color" and "The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and the Objective Rationale of Color."

MONOCHROMATIC

based on ONE HUE varied in value and saturation

COMPLEMENTARY

hues directly opposite each other on the color on the color wheel.

ANALOGOUS

color harmony combine usually no more than three colors next to each other on the color wheel.

SPLIT COMPLEMENTARY

consists of one color and two colors adjoining its complementary color.

DOUBLE COMPLEMENTARY

This color harmony recommends the use of two closely related hues and their complements.

TRIADIC

The use of three colors equally spaced as possible on the color wheel.

TETRADIC

Are any four hues equidistant from each other.

NEUTRAL W/ 1 COLOR

The use of earthly/neutral colors such as browns, grays and taupes accented with one color from the color wheel.

NEUTRAL

The use of earthly/neutral colors such as browns, grays and taupes.

WHITE LIGHT

is produced as long as a source emits the red, green, and blue wavelengths in roughly equal proportions.

CYAN

produced when blue and green wavelengths are combined.

MAGENTA

red and blue wavelengths are produced.

YELLOW

produced when green and red wavelengths are combined.

CYAN, MAGENTA, YELLOW

secondary colors of light.

ADDITIVE MIXTURE

combination of the three primary color wavelengths of light to form other colors including white.