Color Theory
Color theory is a body of practical guidance to color mixing and the visual effects of a specific color combination. There are also definitions (or categories) of colors based on the color wheel: primary color, secondary color, and tertiary color. Most color effects are due to contrasts on three relative attributes which define all colors:
- • Value (light vs. dark, or white vs. black)
- • Chroma incl. saturation, purity, strength, intensity (intense vs. dull)
- • Hue (e.g. the name of the color family: red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta)
Chronometry Theory
Chronometry is the science of the measurement of time. Time is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, to the future. Time is often referred to as a fourth dimension, along with three spatial dimensions.
Methods of temporal measurement, or chronometry, take two distinct forms: the calendar, a mathematical tool for organising intervals of time, and the clock, a physical mechanism that counts the passage of time. The clock is consulted for periods less than a day whereas the calendar is consulted for periods longer than a day. Increasingly, personal electronic devices display both calendars and clocks simultaneously.
We perceive warm colors as being closer to us while cool colors as farther. Same also with lighter colors being near and darker colors being farther.
When you switch off the lights —just before complete darkness takes over— you’ll see a dark gray color called eigengrau. This is the term for the uniform dark gray background that many people report seeing in the absence of light.
Psychologists have found that people are likely to recall a colored version of an image compared to a black and white version of it. This is because color has a stronger appeal to the senses, resulting into better connection in parts that have to do with time and memory.
According to Einstein, “the distinction between past and present and future is only an illusion, however persistent.” This is because space and time are fluid, and are affected by gravity and speed.
It takes time for light to reach us, and as a result, everything we see is in the past. When you see the sun out your window, the light is already eight minutes and 20 seconds old. The light from Earth’s nearest star Proxima Centauri is four years old.
In rainbows, each hue blends into the next without a hard boundary, leaving the interpretation up to the person who sees it and the culture that has defined it as to the number of colors present.
Like so many other areas of science, Isaac Newton completely redefined the conventional theories on the behavior of light when he published the first edition of Opticks in 1704. Rather than seeing light as a void of color, Newton discovered that white light is a combination of all colors across the color spectrum. The basics of his experiments was a well-known phenomena: When you shine white light through a prism, the light is split into colors from across the color spectrum. However, Newton discovered that he could recombine these spectral colors to once again turn them into white light. Newton also discovered that if he blended the first color (red) and last color (violet) of the color spectrum, he could produce magenta, an extra-spectral color that does not exist in the rainbow.
In a quest to create a unified notation for color – like we know it from musical notation – artists soon started depicting the color spectrum as 3D solids. Tobias Mayer sought to accurately define the number of individual colors the human eye can see, and this required him to add another dimension to represent the variations of brightness for each color. Mayer painted the corners of a triangle with the three traditional primary colors from painting – red, yellow, and blue – and connected the corners by mixing the opposing colors together. Unlike the traditional color circle, he created many variations of this triangle by stacking triangles of different brightnesses on top of each other. This made it possible to define a color by its position within a 3D space, a technique still used to this day.
Munsell’s color system divided the color space into three new dimensions: The hue determined the type of color (red, blue, etc), the value determined the brightness of the color (light or dark), and the chroma determined the saturation of the color (the purity of the color). These dimensions are still used to this day in some representations of the RGB color model. Munsell realised that his color solid had to have an irregular shape to fit his theory. Munsell’s color system preferred the use of a mathematical syntax over color names to indicate a color’s position within the color space. This is like how colors in programming languages are defined, Munsell’s color system bridging art and science.
