David Briggs -The Theory of Colour

Lecture 3: The Teaching of Colour

AGNSW Domain Theatre, November 29, 2014
Traditional, complementary and opponent hue systems

In traditional colour theory, colours are classified in terms of their red, and yellow
and blue “components”, and opposite or complementary colour pairs can be deduced
logically. As we saw in the system of Johannes Itten, perceptually pure red is
considered complementary to a green “made of” yellow and blue in equal amounts,
and therefore looking neither yellowish nor bluish [3-01]. Perceptually pure yellow is
complementary to a purple made equally of red and blue, and therefore visually
equidistant between the two. Perceptually pure blue is similarly complementary to an
orange equidistant between red and yellow. In traditional colour theory these
complementary pairs are assumed to apply both to paint-mixing (showing pairs of
paints that mix to make neutral grey or black) and vision (indicating colours of
maximum contrast and colours of afterimages).

The revolution in our understanding of colour in the mid-19th century established

that the complementary pairs that mix to make white light are different to those of
traditional colour theory. These pairs are familiar to many from the colour circle
used in digital programs: red opposite blue-green (cyan), green opposite blue-red
(magenta) and yellow opposite a deep blue entirely lacking in cyan [3-02 to 05]. This
arrangement is more perceptually even than the traditional colour wheel, and gives
roughly accurate complements for afterimages [3-04] and paint-mixing [3-05],
except near the yellow-blue axis. Other systems that essentially share this additive-
complementary arrangement include the Munsell System (based on equal perceptual
spacing) and the Ostwald system. For questions concerned with colour stimulus, a
hue circle using the additive-complementary arrangement is the most appropriate.

Following the acceptance of the opponent model as part of the zone theory of colour
vision, it has been widely accepted that, the fundamental opposing pairs in terms of
our mental experience of colour are red opposite green and yellow opposite blue [3-
06]. For questions principally concerned with colour experience (for example, colour
expression), a hue circle based on the opponent pairs is the most relevant.

After the Revolution

Soon after the mid-19th century revolution, a succession of textbooks were written for
artists explaining that the historical primary colours red, yellow and blue had been
overturned, and that the “real” primary colours were the additive primaries red,
green and blue/violet [3-07]. In the case of Wilhelm von Bezold (1837-1907) and
Ogden Rood (1831-1902) the authors were respected scientists who were also
amateur painters. Examining some of the various responses to the challenge
presented by this new information provides an overview of the rich variety of
approaches to colour education during the next century.

One approach important in the late 19th century was to abandon the notion of red,
yellow and blue primaries, but to retain the familiar arrangement of the colour wheel,
now structured around six “spectral” primaries: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and
violet. In two such systems, devised by the pioneering colour printer Louis Prang
(1824-1909) [3-08] and the games manufacturer Milton Bradley (1836-1911) [3-09],
the precise hues of these spectral primaries and their intermediates were defined in
the form of sets of coloured chips. Bradley made it clear that opposite colours in his
system were not additive complementaries, and recommended that students discover
the latter by using spinning tops [3-10].

The artist and art teacher Albert Munsell (1858-1918) refined this standards-based
approach in a system arranged around five “principal” hues intended to be evenly
spaced perceptually: red, yellow, green, blue and purple [3-11]. Munsell’s efforts to
have his system taught in schools had limited success, but a simpler relative of his
system by his friend and rival Denman Ross (1853-1935), of hue (using the Prang
divisions), value and relative chroma, was widely used in American design education
in the first half of the 20th century [3-12]. After being further refined by the Optical
Society of America in 1943 the Munsell system became a very important
technological standard, and was adopted in some college level textbooks, notably
Maitland Graves’ The Art of Color and Design (1941, 1951). Munsell’s own text A
Color Notation (1905) went through numerous editions and reprints up to the
1990’s, when it was succeeded by The New Munsell Student Color Set. The Munsell
system has been used in the training of many illustrators and artists in the system of
American art teacher Frank Reilly (see below).

Several systems have tried to incorporate both opponent and complementary

organization. The system devised by chemist and amateur painter Wilhelm Ostwald
(1853-1932), shows colours in additive complementary pairs, but arranged in a
quasi-opponent framework with yellow opposite blue and a crimson red opposite
“sea-green” [3-13]. The system was very widely used in art education in the first half
of the 20th century, and was the standard in schools in Britain between the wars [3-
14]. The Ostwald system was widely used at the Bauhaus after the departure of Itten
in 1923. Some literally eccentric systems tried to represent both complementary and
opponent relationships in the same diagram [3-15, 16]. The fully opponent Swedish
NCS system, first published in 1978, is the standard for schools in Scandinavia and
Spain [3-17].

Another approach has been to replace the historical primaries red, yellow and blue
with the three modern subtractive primaries, cyan, magenta and yellow (under
various names) and to arrange the hue circle around pairs of paint-mixing
complementaries: e.g. magenta opposite green, scarlet red opposite cyan, and yellow
opposite blue-violet [3-18 to 20].
Red, yellow and blue strike back

At the Bauhaus Johannes Itten (1888-1967) had used a modern hue system his
mentor Adolf Hoelzel derived from the scientist Bezold, which placed yellow, cyan
blue and “purple” (magenta) at equal intervals, but when he came to publish The Art
of Color in 1961, Itten reverted to a hue circle structured around the historical
primaries [3-21]. In The Art of Color Itten excluded virtually all reference to the
discoveries of late 19th and early 20th century science, and presented an approach to
colour theory and classification fixated at an early 19th century level (Briggs, 2013a).
No-one had suddenly discovered that the paint-mixing or afterimage complement of
a psychologically pure red was a pure green, but Itten’s simplistic approach proved
widely popular at the time, and even today remains the dominant influence on the
teaching of “colour theory”. The popular success of Itten’s system must be seen in
the context of the simultaneous reduction and elimination of other technical
elements, like anatomy and perspective, in art education.

Itten’s approach is so dominant today that not only is the system of red, yellow and
blue primaries still widely taught even at tertiary level, but many assume that the
“traditional” system has been used universally in art education for centuries. In
addition, the very notion of what colour theory is has been shaped by what was and
wasn’t included by Itten. For many, colour theory is primarily about rules of colour
harmony, dictionary “meanings” of colours, and the limited subset of colour
phenomena known to early 19th century science, such as simultaneous contrast.
Colour mixing instruction often focusses on the colour wheel rather than colour
space, and so is largely concerned with mixing hues rather than mixing colours. (e. g.
it tells how to mix “orange”, but not how to efficiently mix an orange of a particular
hue, chroma and value). The practical difficulty that a perceptually pure red, yellow,
and blue palette can not mix a full range of colours has been evaded by reviving the
entirely spurious “split-primary” theory (Briggs, 2013b).

Colour and light

I want to conclude this series with a short account of the use of colour in depicting
effects of light. This is an aspect of colour that is often neglected in colour theory for
the artist, but which at times has been considered the most important element of all,
and has certainly had a much greater influence on how paintings look than any
“rules” of colour harmony and colour meaning.

Most objects reflect light in two different ways simultaneously: a diffuse reflection
that takes on the colour of the object, and a specular reflection that usually retains
the colour of the light source. The diffuse reflection is strongest facing the light
source and decreases as the planes turn away from the light, providing the artist’s
main means of modelling form [3-22]. Typically the paint colours that we use to
represent this progression increase steadily in chroma as the value increases. The
specular reflection of the light source, or “highlight”, is seen at the point where the
light bounces to the eye, and moves as the observer moves [3-23]. When the light
source is whitish and the specular reflection is “fuzzy” it creates a broad zone where
chroma decreases as value increases.

Pliny the Elder recorded how Greek painting developed from flat colour
(“monochromes”) by discovering “tone”, the representation of lights, highlights
(splendor) and shadow, and the “attunement” of colour to these divisions [3-24, 25].
This knowledge gradually faded in medieval times, and instructional texts of this
period are limited to recipes for mixing progressions of colour from dark to light that
do not produce realistic or even consistent colour relationships [3-26, 27]. The
knowledge reappears in the Renaissance in northern European oil painting and in
the writings of Alberti and of Leonardo, who extended it with his researches into
such topics as reflected lights and atmospheric perspective [3-28 to 32].

Developments beyond a purely verbal description of colour in relation to light and

shade had to await the concept of colour space as a framework for visualizing colour
relationships. An important innovator was Arthur Pope (1880-1974), a student of
Denman Ross who developed his teacher’s system in a way that allowed it to be used
to visualize the effect of changing illumination on single- and multi-coloured objects,
as well as other effects including atmospheric perspective [3-33 to 36]. Kodak
scientist Ralph Evans acknowledged Pope’s contribution to his concept of a scale of
“brilliance”, in which a colour appears greyed, bright, fluorent (fluorescent-looking)
or self-luminous depending on its relationship to surrounding colours [3-37]. Before
the advent of digital painting, the American art teacher Frank Reilly (1906-1967)
devised an elaborate system for calculating colour relationships in the framework of
the Munsell system, which could be applied in painting using an elaborate palette of
pre-mixed colours. The Reilly system was used by several generations of illustrators
to invent scenes under various kinds of illumination and atmosphere, and has been
set down in books by several of Reilly’s former students [3-38]. Pope’s principles can
now be very easily applied in digital painting, particularly given that the widely used
HSB (or HSV) colour model parallels the colour dimensions he devised [3-39].

Further reading

Briggs, D.J.C., 2007. Basics of light and shade.

http://www.huevaluechroma.com/021.php (et seq.)

Briggs, D.J.C., 2007. Principles of colour and light.

http://www.huevaluechroma.com/101.php (et seq.)

Briggs, D.J.C., 2013a. Itten’s colour theory and hue system.

http://www.huevaluechroma.com/072.php#Itten

Briggs, D.J.C., 2013b. “Spilt-primary” theory

http://www.huevaluechroma.com/062.php#split

Text copyright David Briggs, 2014 djcbriggs@gmail.com

Accompanying slides are available at https://sites.google.com/site/djcbriggs/classes