Introduction to colour principles

Colour can be destructive, making things illegible. Colour has to be used correctly.

Colour based on perception, it travels to us through waves.

EYES

The eye contains 2 kinds of receptors.
Rods and cones
While the rods convey shades of grey, the cones allow the brain to perceive colours.

Of the 3 types of cones the first is sensitive to red orange light, the second to green light and the third to blue violet light.
When a single cone is stimulated, the brain perceives the corresponding colour.
If our green cones are stimulates we see green.
If our red orange cones are stimulated we see red.
If both our green and red orange cones are simultaneously stimulated, our perception is yellow. 



Colour

Primary colours, Red, yellow, blue
mixing 2 primary colours gives you a secondary colour

Secondary colours, orange, green, violet

Tertiary, to get a tertiary you mix together a primary and secondary.

Red, Green, Blue, RGB spectural colour  
Cyan, magenta, yellow are primary colours in CMYK, secondary colours are RGB

Subtracted colour, when mixing primary colours you remove the colour values. CMYK are secondary colours: INK

Additive colour, when adding Red, Green, Blue it forms white: LIGHT

Complimentary colours, colours opposite on the colour wheel

Lecture Part 2

Chromatic Value = Hue + Tone + Saturation 

Hue is the name we give to  colour, to distinguish between them, e.g. bluey green, green and yellowy green

Luminance is how bright something is 

SHADE 
Darker colours absorb a lot of light 
Lighter colours reflect more light 

TINT, reducing the chromatic value, haves more luminance 

TONES, comes from desaturating a colour 

Saturation is how much colour is there. 


Colours change depending on what is surrounding them and what they can be compared against, as shown below. Our perception of a colour changes when a colour is put next to it  , so what might of been a red before might change to a darker more violet red after.  

As can be seen here despite the fact the outside colour is all the same but it seems to change when you move past the middle point 

For a task we were asked to layout all the colours we had collected in a colour wheel type layout, ordering them from the most yellow orange to the most red orange. The selection of orange objects below are what i brought in.

This is the layout we as a group arranged into the different tones of each colour. 

This is the final outcome, as can be seen each group looked at each object and decided whether or not it  had more of one colour that was next to it in the colour wheel, for example in my group i looked at a object and decided it had a lot of yellow in it so put it at the end where the yellow joined on to the orange.

After this we were asked to select 7 objects that displayed the most yellow, most red, the darkest, the lightest, the palest, dullest and the standard orange. With each of these objects we used the pantone set we were introduced too to match them up with the closest colours.  

Our pantone selection was: 

MOST YELLOW - Shavers, Pantone 123c,  

15pts Pantone Yellow 93.8

1pt Pantone Warm Red 6.2

MOST RED - Nail Varnish, Pantone 173c 

12pts Warm Red 72.2 

4pts Yellow 24.3 

1/2 Black 3.0 

BRIGHTEST - Glove, Pantone 1645c 

10pts Warm Red 62.5 

6pts Yellow 37.5 

DARKEST - Reeses, Pantone 1655c 

10pts Warm Red 62.5 

6pts Yellow 37.5 

PALEST - Ticket, Pantone 712m 

4pts or .021 3.0 

1/8pt Black .06 

202 1/8pts Trans Wit 98.00 

DULLEST  -  T - Shirt, Pantone 1635m 

21/2 pts Warm Red 15.6 

11/2 pts Yellow 9.4

12pts Trans Wit 75.0 

MOST ORANGE - Jelly Mould, Pantone 1505c 

8pts or.021 50.0 

8pts Trans Wit 50.0