An extraordinary amount of work has gone into defining colors – to serve communication, industry, and philosophy. Industry and science are looking for reliability, artists are looking for practical solutions and embedded meaning, while philosophers care because color highlights the relationship between the physical world and the human mind.
Color Naming
The Color Naming Debate
- Linguistic relativity and the color naming debate: is color cognition innate or cultural?
- ismy.blue: Does your naming of colors match the general population?
- The World Has Millions of Colors. Why Do We Only Name a Few?
Fun Facts and Resources
Systems and Models
Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours is a meeting of art and science. The full text and examples were created by Patrick Syme, a botanical artist and painter in 1814 . He based it on the work of the scientist Abraham Gottlob Werner, a geologist and mineralogist who created a descriptive list of colors in 1774 to help scientists accurately classify and identify rocks and fossils.
The full title of this book, Werner’s nomenclature of colours : with additions, arranged so as to render it highly useful to the arts and sciences, particularly zoology, botany, chemistry, mineralogy, and morbid anatomy : annexed to which are examples selected from well-known objects in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms emphasizes its utility and the need for a shared, consistent language on color in multiple fields.
Syme addressed the ambiguity of words by including color swatches and expanding the natural references to include animals and plants. At the time his book was widely used by scientists, including Charles Darwin during his famous voyage on the Beagle. While his references were designed to be practical at the time, now that many of them are unfamiliar to most of us they read as poetic. The references for Flax Flower Blue include Animal: Light parts of the margin of the wings of Devil’s Butterfly, Vegetable: Flax Flower, and Mineral: Blue Copper Ore. For Pistachio Green, Animal: Neck of an Eider Drake, Vegetable: Ripe Pound Pear, and Mineral: Crysolite. For Straw Yellow, Animal: Polar Bear, Vegetable: Oat Straw, and Mineral: Schorlite, Calamine. In our digital world of hex codes, it’s a wake up call to see colors grounded in nature.
While we may not encounter his references in our current daily lives, his swatches and notes are still useful to anyone mixing colors. Flax Flower Blue is “Berlin blue, with a slight tinge of ultramarine blue“. Pistachio Green is “emerald green mixed with a little lemon yellow, and a small quantity of brown”. Straw Yellow is “sulphur yellow mixed with much greyish white and a little ochre yellow“.
See Also
- Werner’s nomenclature of colours
- Online designed by Nicholas Rougeux (note, beautifully done)
- Name the Springtime Colors Around You With the Guidebook Charles Darwin Used
Munsell’s color system is based on human visual perception, and was first published as A Color Notation in 1905, followed by an Atlas in 1913/1915, and then the influential Munsell Book of Color in 1929. It is still used today.
It defines colors using three independent dimensions:
- Hue (color name): Fve principal hues (Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple) and five intermediate hues (YR, GY, BG, PB, RP).
- Value (lightness/darkness): Ranging from 0 (pure black) at the bottom to 10 (pure white) at the top.
- Chroma (purity/saturation): Measures the distance from the neutral gray axis outwards, with higher numbers indicating more intense, saturated colors.
- The goal here is consistent identification of colors.
Note that Munsell doesn’t insist on, or impose, symmetry. His system was designed for practical purposes where color matching was informational especially in industry, and agriculture, as seen in the soil chart above.
See also:
- Atlas of the Munsell color system by Munsell, A. H. (Albert Henry), 1858-1918
- https://munsell.com/
- Art Meets Science: Munsell’s Colour System: The Enduring Legacy of Colour Theory, Science, and Art
- Smithsonian: Atlas of the Munsell color system
- The Public Domain Review: Atlas of the Munsell Color System (1915)
Originalmodell von 1918
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Farbdoppelkegel
Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald was a German chemist and passionate amateur painter, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1909.
Munsell’s Color Atlas inspired Ostwald to create his own classification system published in Die Farbenfibel (The Colour Primer) in 1916. Ostwald’s system is highly conceptual, forcing colors into symmetry.
- Based on the premise that all colors are combinations of full color, white, and black
- Four primary sensations: yellow, red, blue, and sea green, which are expanded into 24 evenly spaced hues
- 8 shades, from white to black, are used
- One of the goals is “harmonious” combinations, produce by an orderly arrangements of colors
While this system was ultimately not as successful or long lasting as Munsell’s, it did have an influence on the Bauhaus (which is why Albers’ mentions it).
See also
Color-aid was first invented in 1948 as a back drop for photographers, but its use by Josef Albers has made it a standard for studying color. Its full set is 314 colors, the standard set 220.
Color-aid’s system defines 3 attributes (or dimensions) of color: Hue, Saturation, Lightness.
It uses an exact naming for it’s colors based on the system below
Hues (HUE):
These are the most saturated colors
R = red | RO = red-orange | O = orange | YO = yellow-orange | Y = yellow | YG yellow-green | G = green | BG = blue-green | C = cyan | B = blue | BV = blue-violet | V = violet | RV = red-violet | M = magenta
- some of these include a note that they are w = warm or c = cool
- Extra Hues (EX) are included for a limited number of hues
Most hues have a varying number of
- Tints (T): varying degrees of whiteness
- Light Tints (LT) are included for a limited number of hues
- Shades (S): varying degrees of blackness
- Dark Shades (DS) are included for a limited number of hues
- Pastels or Tones (P)
- varying degrees of both whiteness and blackness.
- two numbers, one to indicate their shade and a second number to indicate the degree of whiteness
- Light Pastels (LP) are included for a limited number of hues
The Achromatics
- Black (1)
- Grays (1.5, 2, etc-9.5)
- White (10)
Some examples of naming
- R-T2 = red, tint two
- YGw-P4-1= warm yellow-green pastel four, one.
See Also
Itten, like Albers, was part of the Bauhaus and from 1919-23 taught a required course, focusing on form and color theory. He developed a color wheel and framework of seven “color contrasts” to help artist understand how colors interact, both of which are still referred to today. His goal was to move the concept of “harmonious” colors out of the subjective, into the objective, “The concept of color harmony should be removed from the realm of subjective attitude into that of objective principle”. It’s important to keep in mind that for Itten, “Harmony implies balance, symmetry of forces”, but he didn’t feel all art had to be “harmonious” (using his definition).
Itten’s Color Wheel
Itten’s color wheel includes twelve colors:
- the three primary colors
- the three secondary colors
- the six tertiary colors.
It also functioned as a “cheat sheet” to finding harmonious colors, “We can make the general statement that all complementary pairs, all triads whose colors form equilateral or isosceles triangles in the twelve member color circle, and all tetrads forming squares or rectangles, are harmonious.”
Itten’s Color Contrasts established principles for creating “harmony”.
Contrast of Hue: Strongest when using colors furthest apart on the color wheel.
Complementary Contrast: Pairing colors that sit directly opposite each other on the color wheel (e.g., red and green, or blue and orange) to create high vibration and vibrancy
Light-Dark Contrast: Strongest (but not limited to) in black and white images
Cold-Warm Contrast: Placing colors traditionally considered “Cool” next to those considered “Warm” to create a dynamic or atmospheric effect.
Simultaneous Contrast: The optical illusion that occurs when two colors are placed in context, changing the perception of both.
Contrast of Saturation: The contrast between pure, highly saturated colors and dull, muted versions of those same colors.
Contrast of Extension (Proportion): In this contrast the goal is to achieve balance by accounting for the visual weight/impact of a color.
Emotion
Unlike Albers, Itten believed that colors had “meaning”, systematically reflecting, impacting, and inspiring emotions. While people have greatly simplified his work on emotional meaning and seasons, he was himself quite emotional about colors, writing “From demonic, sinister red-orange on black, to sweet angelic pink, red can express all intermediate degrees between the infernal and the sublime. Only the ethereal, transparent, aerial is barred to it, for there blue reigns supreme.”
Itten was a personality – you can read more here 6 Facts About Johannes Itten, the Famous Bauhaus Teacher
Albers and Itten
Itten’s book The Art of Color was published in 1961, and Albers’ The Interaction of Color in 1963. It’s quite telling that Albers says, “In my color book there is no new theory of color. But, in it, there is a way to learn to see.” (emphasis mine). Albers versus Itten dives into both books and contrasts their contents and each authors pedagogical style.
See also: