Color Crazy

Color Crazy: How Colors Work in Nature, Art and Culture

Color Crazy painting by Janet Strayer

So many colors to love, it can drive you colour crazy. The power and meaning of color are evident in nature and the cultural world. In nature, colors signal ripeness or poisonousness and serve to attract many animals, including us. They mean even more to to us in our cultural world. Colors can irritate or soothe, raise or lower blood pressure, affect mood and reactions.

Color is Peculiar

Oddly enough, color is not an inherent property of objects. The world is colorless, as Galileo tells us. Color is a sensation that exists because light exists and acts differently for different species based upon their particular neurophysiology. Sensory receptors and brains in many species are equipped to register and perceive color. Humans have three types of color receptions (for red, green, and blue light), so all the colors we can see are composed of red, green, and blue. Yet these three are enough to distinguish thousands of color variations.

Humans can survive without color vision. We can detect shape, edges, and other necessary visual facts without color. Other animals, like birds, detect more colors than we can. But among primates, humans have the keenest colour vision. This may have evolved because colour functions to affect emotions, provide information, and for communication.

Color is to our vision as flavours are to our taste, which the food industry knows when using artificial colours to enhance products. And as advertisers and designers know, colors affect our attention and reaction to products, packaging, and settings.

Colors have delighted and mystified us for ages, sparking theories, scientific investigations, and systems to describe and understand them. Isaac Newton as well as the author Goethe are among the many scientific contributors. Human psychology and culture, too, have shaped our perception of and reactions to color.

Two Worlds of Color: as Light or as Pigment

Some artists, like me, are color crazy and just love working with colour. In the art world, colors derive from pigments. But in the natural world, colors are a phenomenon of light wavelengths..These two worlds differ in how color is seen. Pigments work differently than light waves, so blending pigments yield different results than blending light waves.

White light contains all visible colors in a spectrum that appears in a rainbow, from red to violent in sequence. Nature's primary colours (those that cannot be mixed by any other combination of colours) are red, blue, and green. Mixing the primary color light waves in different combinations will get us almost all other colors. For example, mixing red and green light yields yellow. Surprised?

Here's the glitch: pigments don't behave as light does! Even the primary colours in pigments (yellow, red/magenta, blue/cyan) differ from light primaries. Mixing pigment red and green colors yields brown, not yellow.

Neverthess. most color systems (for artists, too) rely on the light-based system of color. Our eyes see color based upon light refraction, so light theories prevail even in painters' understanding of color. You paint using pigments, but you see the colors you've created via light. How to get the red you see in the world onto your palette requires a translation of light into pigment. Aha, there's the skill!

Color Systems

Computer monitors, TV, and the like use an Additive Color Model based upon transmitted light. In contrast, pigment colours use a Subtractive Color Model based upon reflected light (chemicals in different pigments absorb wavelengths selectively). If the physics of this interest you, there are scads of articles with illustrations on the internet.

What most interests me, however, is how to create with pigment the color we see via light.

color wheel

Artists use a cheat-sheet to help them do this. It's called a color-wheel. You've probably seen some. They range from simple 12-step circles, shown here (3 primary colors and their intermediaries) to elaborate models that fill in the continuum of colors in-between. All these wheels and models do is remind us of some basic pigment-color relationships. For example, colors opposite each other on the wheel are those that contrast most with each other (red and green, for example). Mixing Two primary colors (red and yellow) will result in a secondary hue (orange). And so on. Lots to experiment with. And that's what it's really all about. Because seldom do artists just want simply to duplicate colours on the wheel.

Do You See What I See?

Artists want to create the color they see in the world or in their mind. There are now many pigments (natural and human-made) for red, blue, and yellow. So which of the reds will do? That's important because accurate color-mixing depends on knowing which red, for instance, to mix with which yellow to get a particular orange. Pigments nowadays are systematically described by alphanumeric codes (I'll spare you that).

Decorators and color manufacturers must have a blast naming the varieties of colours within a given hue (or basic color family, like red or blue). Walking into the paint section of Home Depot, I picked up about 30 different color cards showing company names for varieties of blue.. Same for other hues. There are so many varieties of white pigment that you come to appreciate the fact that white light contains all colours. The paint section of many hardware stores are play-pens for anyone liking color. The point is, color names can be very confusing. Try describing a color you like to someone. Periwinkle blue? Sky blue? What's important, especially for artists, is to know how to get the color you want via pigments. A little appreciation here for those who can!

Identifying and describing color boils down to three basic components: Hue (name on the color wheel), Value (where the hue falls on a darkness-lightness continuum), and Saturation (hue purity). What we call maroon, for example, is a red hue that is dark and low saturation (a less intense red) because it's been been mixed with another color (brown) that dulls it. Dull colors are key to painting because of how well they harmonize with brighter, saturated colors straight out of the paint tube or crayon box.

Want to throw that palette at the wall yet? Wait!. In both the natural and art worlds, all colors are changed by the colors around them. Yes, everything is relative! Don't worry so much about any one color, but look at how it fits in its surroundings. Many colorists learn to think in terms of color "families" (different tints, tones, and shades of red, for instance). As someone who loves working with color, I do this and then look to see if a color I paint has the effects I want based upon the colors around it, changing colour mixtures as I go. No formulas, just a look-see process. It's fun and possibly exasperating.

Appreciating color, whether or not you care about its theory and descriptors, is all about being aware of the variations in color families, and a bit about the effects different colours and combinations can have. Effects can be harmonious, pleasing or displeasing, etc. -- all of which are meaningful for artistic effects and mood communication. A bit about the psycho-cultural aspects of colour comes into the picture as well.

Psychophysiological and Cultural Aspects of Colour

Visual artists use colors deliberately for their different effects. The associations we have to colors also occur within larger historical-cultural contexts that give them meaning.

To get an idea of how much humans value color, I'd like to recommend a good read: Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox (2003) by Victoria Finlay. It's a wonderful book that reads as easily as a detective story, it tells the dramatic history of different colors. A mix of travelogue and adventure tale, it relates the quest to find different pigments, how each was discovered or invented in different regions of the world, then traded and used. It relates a time when orange was poison, when blue was as expensive as gold, and how purple built a nation. The book is a captivating mix of history, culture, chemistry, and the practical, social, and artistic issues in the use of color across centuries.

From a psychological viewpoint: if we can see colour, we're affected by it.. This is true of most animals, particularly humans. The psychological aspects of colour derive from the peculiarities of our visual perception system. We have different detectors in our eyes for black/white values (rods) and for color (cones). Many visual phenomena are built into our perceptual system, including visual after-effects. Stare exclusively at red for a bit, then move your eyes to a blank area and you'll see green. Same for blue and yellow. Simultaneous contrast is the tendency of one a color to induce its opposite on adjacent colors. This is fundamental to painting. Place a white next to any dark to make it darker (and the reciprocal). That's what explains why the grey line below looks as if it is changing in brightness (it is not). Same for the two dots.

simultaneous contrast examples

Similar effects happen for colour contrasts. For example, blue looks darkest against a pale yellow, lighter against a dark green, and most intense against an orange. Op Art has a party with these perceptual illusions. Many other interesting perceptual effects have been studied and lead to the conclusion that colors relate in a dynamic system that affects of psychophysiologically, whether or not we're aware of it.

A dominant color in a painting or a room can have a psychological impact via learned cultural associations as well as our perceptual system. Some cultural associations are noted below. But keep in mind that that these can easily differ among individuals. Also, what we say for one yellow does doesn't necessarily apply across the range or family of yellows. For example, the associations to yellow-orange are generally positive while those to yellow-green are generally more aversive. Keep this in mind when reading the very simple list of common associations listed below. Our subjective preferences and personal experience of colors likely have as much or more sway than the general associations listed below.

Colour Associations

Generally, warm colours (red, orange, yellow side of the color wheel) tend to evoke feelings ranging from warmth to anger and hostility. Colors on the cool side of the wheel (blue, purple, and green) tend to evoke feelings from calm to sadness. The list below is intended to be for fun rather than formula. Even in this fun list, you'll see some contrary associations to the same colour. That's because each color can yield varied reactions depending upon its tint. For example, light purple has more positive associations than dark purple.

YELLOW: associates to Optimism, Happiness, Friendliness when it's a pure yellow or yellow-orange, but yellow-green tends towards Anxiety or Distaste.

ORANGE: has the strongest physiological responses (both positive and negative) of all colours empirically tested. It stimulates energy and attention ans associates to Enthusiasm, Energy, Fun, Warmth, Flamboyance, Danger.

RED: tends to increase heart rate. Some studies indicate females prefer red more than males do. Red associates to Passion, Aggression, Excitement, Danger, Blood, Fire

GREEN: has more pigment types than any other colour. It associates to Peace, Rest, Reassurance,

BLUE: Tends to lower heart rate. It associates to Calm, Trust, Coolness, Intelligence, Indifference

PURPLE: associates to Luxury, Dark Magic, Extravagance, Death, Mourning. It is now often used in video games for "evil" figures

BLACK: associates to Power, Glamour, Mystery, Death, Evil

WHITE: gives a sense of space and is inclusive of all colours, or it can be too stark and remote. It associates to Light, Purity, Clarity, Serenity, Sterility

Each historical epoch and culture attributes meaning to colours somewhat differently, emphasizing some aspects over other common associations. White is the colour for mourning death in Japan because it is associated with purity and spirituality in an afterlife. A similar emphasis on purity makes white associate with virginity ( weddings) western countries, whereas red is the customary wedding color in several East Asian countries. . Black is the colour of mourning in many Western countries that emphasize its association with death and loss. In contrast, white is the mourning color in East Asian countries.

Conclusion

If there is any conclusion to be drawn from all this, it's that colours operate in wonderfully predictable as well as diverse ways. That's because we live in a physical and psychological reality that includes our optical and subjective perception as humans in a historically changing cultural context.

Which color do you like best? That answer depends not only on what colors you see, but just as much, or more, upon social and psychological factors influencing you, like where you grew up, your present context, and how you are feeling. Color is your mind reflecting itself.

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