50 Fun Facts About Color Theory

Which scientist arranged the colors of the spectrum into a circle in his 1704 book Opticks?

Isaac Newton closed the circle by joining the two ends of the spectrum, then sized its slices to match the intervals of a musical scale.

Which term names pairs such as red and green that sit opposite on the color wheel and mix to gray?

Complementary pairs cancel to a neutral when mixed, yet make each other look brighter when placed side by side, a contrast Monet and Renoir used on purpose.

Which color takes its name from an 1859 battle fought in northern Italy?

Magenta was a new aniline dye renamed in 1860 to honor the French and Sardinian victory over Austria at the Lombard town of Magenta a year earlier.

Which painter built A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte from tiny dots of color?

Georges Seurat left the blending to the viewer's eye, a method that art critics of the 1880s named Pointillism in order to mock it.

Which film process, used for The Wizard of Oz, recorded color on three black-and-white negatives?

Technicolor cameras split the incoming light three ways and filmed each part through its own color filter. Dyes put the color back when the three records were printed together.

Which color was simply called yellow-red in English until a fruit lent it a name in the 1500s?

Orange was a fruit long before it was a color: the word traces back to the Sanskrit for the tree, and it is not recorded as an English color name until the early 1500s.

Which painter set red walls against a green ceiling in The Night Café, painted in Arles in 1888?

Vincent van Gogh told his brother he chose the clash on purpose, to show a place where a person could ruin himself, go mad or commit a crime.

Which tint of red, a hue lightened with white, takes its name from the frilly-edged Dianthus flower?

Pink was a flower before it was a color: garden pinks, of the genus Dianthus, lent their name to the pale red of their petals in the late 1600s.

Which Dutch painter limited his grid paintings to red, yellow and blue plus black, white and gray?

Piet Mondrian called the pared-down style neoplasticism, and it outlived him: Yves Saint Laurent turned the grids into shift dresses in 1965.

Which illusion leaves a ghost in the opposite hue on a blank wall once you stop staring at a colored shape?

Afterimages form because the eye adapts to the first color and signals it more weakly, so a blank wall briefly reads as its opposite: stare at yellow and the ghost is bluish.

Which color scheme combines neighbors on the wheel, such as blue, blue-green and green?

Analogous schemes are low in contrast, which is their strength, and nature is full of them: turning fall leaves step through neighboring hues.

Which color scheme describes a room decorated only in mint, emerald and forest green?

Monochromatic schemes draw all their variety from light and dark, which is how Picasso filled the canvases of his Blue Period.

Which color scheme picks three hues evenly spaced around the wheel, as red, yellow and blue are?

Triadic hues sit a third of the way round the wheel from one another, so an equilateral triangle laid on it finds them. The contrast is strong but easier to balance than a pair of opposites.

Which class of colors on the painter's wheel has double names such as blue-green and yellow-green?

Tertiary colors come from mixing a primary with the secondary next to it, six in all. Some have names of their own: blue-green is teal, and yellow-green is chartreuse.

In strict color terms, which word means a hue darkened with black, as navy is to blue?

Shade is used loosely for any variety of a color, but painters reserve it for a mix with black. Adding white instead gives a tint, and adding gray gives a tone.

Which property of a color measures how light or dark it is, as shown on a scale from black to white?

Value is what a black-and-white photograph keeps once the hue is thrown away. One widely used color atlas scores it from 0 for black up to 10 for white.

Which property falls as a vivid red fades toward gray without getting any lighter or darker?

Saturation is the share of pure color in what the eye sees. Painters lower it by mixing in gray, or a little of the hue's opposite on the wheel.

Which family of hues is said to advance toward the viewer in a painting while its opposite seems to recede?

Warm hues are said to come forward while cool blues seem to recede. The labels appear to come from landscape light: a sunset glow against a gray, overcast day.

Which color sits opposite yellow on the painter's wheel, being a mix of the other two primaries?

Purple faces yellow because it contains none of it: each opposite pair on the painter's wheel sets one primary against the mix of the remaining two.

Which kind of color mixing do screens use, in which red, green and blue light together make white?

Additive mixing starts from a dark screen and adds light, so all three primaries at full strength give white. Paint works the other way: mixed pigments always come out darker.

Which four-ink color model do commercial presses use, in contrast to the glowing pixels of a screen?

CMYK adds black to three colored inks because the three together print only an imperfect, muddy black, and one dark ink costs less than three.

Which color, made where green and blue light overlap, is also the name of a standard printer ink?

Cyan takes its name from the Greek kyanos, a word for dark blue enamel. As an ink it does the reverse of its recipe in light: it soaks up red and reflects the rest.

Web colors are written as codes such as #FF0000 for pure red; which number system do the codes use?

Hexadecimal counts in sixteens, with the letters A to F standing for ten to fifteen. Two digits per channel give 256 levels each of red, green and blue.

Which New Jersey company's numbered swatch books let designers and printers match exact ink colors?

Pantone is the name Lawrence Herbert gave the ink business he bought from his employers in 1962, after sorting its jumble of pigments into a system.

A light bulb's color temperature, from a yellowish 2700 to a bluish 6500, is given in which unit?

Kelvins describe how hot a glowing object would have to be to give off that light. The scale runs opposite to art-room talk: the hotter the object, the bluer the glow.

Which glass object fans white sunlight into a band of colors by bending each one a different amount?

Prism experiments in 1666 showed that the colors were already in the white light: a single band sent through a second one came out unchanged.

Which cells in the human retina detect color, coming in three types tuned to different light?

Cones need plenty of light, which is why a garden loses its color at dusk: the rod cells that take over in the dark cannot tell one hue from another.

Which property of light, about 700 nanometers for red and 470 for blue, sets its hue?

Wavelength is all that separates one spectral color from the next, and the eye's window is narrow: roughly 380 to 750 nanometers, with infrared and ultraviolet just outside.

Which eye exam hides numbers in circles of colored dots to reveal red-green color blindness?

Ishihara test plates were first published in 1917 by Shinobu Ishihara, a Tokyo professor. Some are built so that a color-blind viewer reads a different number from everyone else.

Which word, borrowed from medieval music, names the range of colors a screen or printer can show?

Gamut comes from gamma ut, the lowest note of the medieval scale, and grew to mean the whole range of notes. Every device has its own, so a screen image is converted before printing.

Which German poet considered his 1810 book Theory of Colours the most important thing he ever wrote?

Goethe held that color arises where light and darkness meet. Some physicists rejected the book, but the painter Turner studied it closely and named pictures after it.

Which Russian painter, author of Concerning the Spiritual in Art, matched colors to musical sounds?

Wassily Kandinsky likened painting to composing music, and titled his abstract canvases Improvisations and Compositions as a composer might.

Which German-born artist wrote Interaction of Color and painted the series Homage to the Square?

Josef Albers used the nested squares to show that no color has a fixed look: the same paint seems to change when its neighbors change. He taught the idea for years at Yale.

Which Swiss Bauhaus teacher described seven kinds of color contrast and wrote The Art of Color?

Johannes Itten also sorted people's coloring into four types named for the seasons, the seed of the seasonal color analysis that stylists still use.

Which Boston art teacher devised a color system that US scientists adopted for classifying soil?

Albert Munsell's charts outlived the classroom: they are still used to grade soil, to pick the tooth color of dental restorations and to match the color of beer.

Which Scottish physicist combined three filtered photographs of a tartan ribbon into a color image?

James Clerk Maxwell had the ribbon photographed through red, green and blue filters in 1861, then projected the three slides through the same filters onto a single screen.

Which Rosetta Stone scholar proposed in 1802 that the eye has just three kinds of color receptor?

Thomas Young was reasoning far ahead of the evidence: the three kinds of light receptor he predicted were not confirmed by measurement until the twentieth century.

Which movement led by Henri Matisse got its name from a critic's 1905 jibe about wild beasts?

Fauvism prized strong color over realism, and it shows in the titles: Matisse's portrait of his wife from those years is known simply as The Green Stripe.

Which movement's painters avoided black paint and mixed their darks from other colors?

Impressionism treated shadow as color rather than as its absence. Manet, the painter the group looked up to, never gave up black and never exhibited with them.

Which Italian term names the strong contrasts of light and dark that Rembrandt used to model form?

Chiaroscuro began as a Renaissance name for drawings on tinted paper, worked up to white and down to dark. Film later borrowed it for moody, high-contrast lighting.

What did Gobelins dye chemist Michel Chevreul call the apparent shift of a color beside a neighbor?

Simultaneous contrast pushes each color toward the opposite of its neighbor, in lightness as well as hue: the same gray looks darker on white than it does on black.

Which term names the effect that makes two paints match under shop lights yet differ in daylight?

Metamerism happens because quite different mixtures of light can trigger the same response in the eye. Car makers fight it when matching seat fabric, plastic and paint.

Which French term names a painting done entirely in grays, often to imitate stone sculpture?

Grisaille gave patrons the look of carved stone at a painter's price, since real sculpture cost more. Picasso's Guernica is a famous modern example.

Which phenomenon makes red flowers look dark at dusk while leaves and blue petals seem brighter?

The Purkinje effect is named for a Czech anatomist who noticed on dawn walks that his favorite red flowers looked very dark. In dim light the eye's sensitivity shifts toward blue.

Which Nobel Prize-winning chemist took up color after retiring and published The Color Primer?

Wilhelm Ostwald sorted every color by how much white, black and pure hue it held. Painters of the De Stijl group and the Bauhaus took up his ideas.

Which theory did Ewald Hering propose to explain why no color looks both red and green at once?

Opponent process theory treats the hues as rival pairs, red against green and blue against yellow, so one spot can signal either member of a pair but never both.

The pigments umber, sienna and ochre all belong to which family of colors?

Earth tones get their browns and rusty reds from iron and manganese oxides, and they are the oldest paints there are, in use since prehistoric times.

Baby blue, mint green and other pale tints share their family name with which chalky art medium?

Pastel sticks made paler, softer marks than paint from the same pigment, and that look gave the color family its name. Art Deco design of the 1920s was full of them.

Design software's HSL model gives hue as a position around a wheel, measured in which unit?

Degrees suit hue because it runs in a circle: red sits at 0, green at 120 and blue at 240, and 360 brings you back round to red.

Which technique, described by Leonardo da Vinci, makes far-off hills paler and bluer to show depth?

Aerial perspective copies what air does: scattered sky light tints distant objects blue and washes out their detail, so painters fade the background on purpose.