|
|
|
What is Colour?
One way colours in sunlight are made visible to us is to pass white light through a prism. Because each of the colours has a different wavelength, each is bent by a different amount. Rainbows are formed when water droplets in the sky act as natural prisms. As sunlight passes through the droplets, each of the different rays is bent by a different amount, creating a rainbow. The rainbow colours form one "octave" of light and are known as the "true hues."
Red is the longest wavelength we can see and it has the slowest frequency of vibration. Its magnetic energy is warming and stimulating. Violet has the shortest wavelength and the quickest vibration. It is cooling and cleansing.
At either end of the visible spectrum are many wavelengths we cannot see. Ultraviolet light is just beyond violet, and farther beyond this are electromagnetic rays with increasing frequencies as the wavelengths get progressively shorter; these include X-rays and gamma rays. At the opposite end, infrared light is found just beyond red light. Like red it has warming qualities although it gives off more concentrated heat; these qualities are utilized in infrared lamps. Beyond this are electromagnetic rays with increasing wavelengths and decreasing frequencies; these include radio waves. Mystics have long believed that we can see colours well outside our normal range of vision by opening our "third eye" during meditation.
The colours that make up the pigments we use in paints, fabrics, and other materials are different; they are obtained by subtraction of light. This effect produces a different trio of primary pigment colours: red, blue, and yellow; they are considered primary because they cannot be made from other colours. When these are combined as paints, they produce black. Subtractive mixing of colours is used, for instance, when working with paints or objects like clothes or furnishings.
Just as positive and negative magnets attract each other, so do complementary colours. You can prove this for yourself by staring at each colour in turn and then quickly moving your gaze to a white piece of paper. For a few moments you will be able to see an after-image of the complementary colour on the paper. You could keep mixing adjacent colours to produce colour wheels with 12, 24, 48 or more variations; each time the difference between two adjacent colours becomes more subtle. You can also make another colour wheel from the additive colours of light. The colours featured on this alternative wheel would be the three primaries of red, green and blue-violet, and the secondary colours of turquoise, yellow and magenta. If you combine any two primary colour pigments, you end up with another trio of pigments: red and yellow make orange, yellow and blue make green, and red and blue make violet. These are the three secondary colours. |
White
light can be separated into three basic or primary colours: red-orange,
green, and blue-violet. When these colours of light are projected together
(e.g. if a lighting engineer in a theater were to merge spotlights of
these colours together), they create white light. This is called additive
mixing of colours; it is sued, for instance, by colour therapists healing
with coloured light.
If
we arrange all these colours around a circle we have a colour wheel.Looking
at the colour wheel we can see that certain colours fall opposite to
each other. Each colour has a complimentary or opposite hue. So on the
colour wheel we have three complementary pairs.