Color: An Investigation

In: Columns > Design in Theory and Practice

By Joshua David McClurg-Genevese

Published on November 6, 2006

Introduction

What is color? Take a moment to consider this question before reading on.

In a previous article, I referred to color as an element of design, one of the basic tools that designers can use when building a composition. I defined color as “the response of the eye to differing wavelengths of radiation within the visible spectrum.” This is a valid definition, but it is only one of many different thoughts on what color is.

Over the course of my next few articles, we will explore the subject of color, including the historical underpinnings of contemporary color theory, key color theories, theorists who have been influential over the past few millennia, and the current state of color—including color in digital environments.

We will, in the end, keep the focus on the discipline of design. But, as in previous articles, we must deviate for a time to better explore the topic at hand. As with all of the principles and elements of design, much is inherited from other fields and we must initially expand the scope of our investigation.

What is color?

What do you think of when you think about color? Perhaps the color wheel, or some color system that you know. Maybe a specific color, a hue or value that particularly appeals to your sense of design. Or perhaps the rainbow; the full spectrum of colors visible to the human eye. Perhaps even a painting, a flower, a shape, or a number.

When you think about color, do you consider it primarily with a scientific mindset, or an artistic one? Is the color red red because of its frequency in the electromagnetic spectrum, or because you have been trained to articulate the psychological response that most people do when they receive sensory stimuli of a kind that means red? Is color dominant or subordinate to other concepts, such as form and value? Is it subjective or objective, or is it both? Would it even exist without our ability to perceive it? (Don’t spend too much time on this last question, you’ll never make it through the rest of the article.)

When I was asked to write about color, and color theory, I asked myself the very same initial question. What is color? It is a seemingly innocuous question, but one that revolves around a deceptive term whose definition has changed over time. The word color has been used to mean many different things. Its application spans a multitude of disciplines, including art, religion, chemistry, physics, psychology, etymology, and linguistics (to name just a few). I found that the more I thought about what color was, the less sure I was about any one meaning.

So I decided to start over. I thought perhaps I could reconstruct my understanding of color by looking into its origins. I endeavored to think about color as a concept unto itself, and not be burdened by its ties to a specific field or medium. I tried to research back to a time before much about color was known, or at least thought about, to see how it all began.

The origins of color

The origins of color are tied to the world around us. Investigating the earliest uses of color entails an examination of the ancient cultures that once inhabited the earth. It is generally believed that the earliest civilizations used color in a very formal way—that the use of certain colors had specific meanings, and these meanings were directly tied into the history, religion, and society of a given culture.^{1, 2, 3}

One example of this is the relating of colors to the elements, such as in the Hindu Upanishads from around the seventh or eighth century B.C. Red was the color of fire, white the color of water, black the color of earth, and everything else a combination of these three things.²

Another example suggests that if we trace the evolution of the perception of color among civilizations of the past, we can tie everything back to three basic colors: black, white, and red. Black and white were historically related to darkness and light. The color red stemmed from blood and the life that it carried.¹

Early civilizations used materials found in nature to produce color; the available raw materials in a given region played a large part in the palette of a given culture. Back as far as the earliest cave paintings, a basic group of colors was formed using charcoal for black, chalk or bone for white, and blood or clay for reds, yellows, and browns.³

Different civilizations would begin working with the raw materials available to them to produce specific colors. One of the earliest examples of this was the Egyptians, and their use of a pigment known as Egyptian blue. This blue color has been identified in artifacts dating from around 2500 B.C., but was not crafted by chance. The process to create such a color involved a number of raw materials: chalk or limestone, sand, and a copper mineral such as malachite, fired in a kiln at rather precise temperatures.³

Artist as alchemist

Over time, as colors came to be more in demand, becoming a symbol of status in many cultures and an ingredient in different art forms and manufacturing processes (as pigments), producing color necessitated an understanding of basic chemical processes. The term “Art” implied technical or manual ability requiring skill as a practical chemist, or alchemist.³

The instructions for the creation of colors, including which raw materials to use and the chemical processes by which they could be transformed, were often written down in the form of secret recipe books known as formularies.¹ These formularies provided a framework for experimentations to help make sense of the many chemical changes that could be wrought on materials. These changes were often accompanied by an alteration of color, and thus the formularies established a foundation for supplying artificial colors to artists.³

Some of the more significant formularies include:^{1, 3}

• The Leiden Papyrus, one of the oldest formularies of dyes that can be traced back to around 400 B.C., Egypt
• Compositiones ad Tingenda (Recipes for Coloring), from around the eighth century; it had one of the first clear descriptions of the making of the color vermilion, a highly sought after red color in the Middle Ages
• Mappae Clavicula, a ninth-century catalogue of recipes for use in painting that included two recipes for the making of vermilion
• De Diversis Artibus (On Diverse Arts), a twelfth-century handbook by Theophilus, an influential Benedictine monk who described in detail the chemical processes for making vermilion, among many other things
• Schedula Diversarum Artium, also by Theophilus in the twelfth century. This book contained very exacting descriptions of techniques and formula needed for the detailed work of illuminated manuscripts
• Il Libro dell’ Arte (The Craftsman’s Handbook), a fourteenth-century book by Cennino Cennini that provided the artist with practical techniques on pigments and painting, as well as prescriptions for depicting flesh, drapery, and water

Still more formularies were concerned with techniques for using fixtures and dryers on various kinds of wood, as well as with mixing pigment with egg yolk, and the production of egg tempra.

An Age of Enlightenment

A very early comprehensive system of thought on the nature of color was On Colors. This small treatise is attributed to either Aristotle or his disciple Theophrastus, but was not published until the late fifteenth century—around the same time as the start of the Renaissance in Europe. In it, Aristotle declared that the colors of the world were created where darkness and light met, and that the simple colors are the colors of the elements: fire, air, water, and earth.²

During the Renaissance, many others took up the concept of color as a worthy subject for investigation. This was in no small part due to the processes and techniques outlined in the formularies circulating around Europe at the time. Additional thinking about the nature of color included:¹

• Leon Battista Alberti, in the fifteenth-century book De Pictura, talked about an elemental scale of materials similar to classical theories. He defined the true colors as: red, blue, green, and gray—the colors of fire, air, water, and earth, respectively
• Antonio Tilesio, in the sixteenth-century book De Coloribus, established a principle of chromatic organization based on a mixture of contemporary and classical colors. He focused on the etymology of the Classical world to help produce twelve simple colors that could be expanded into various color families
• Leonardo da Vinci, in the sixteenth-century treatise On Painting, considered six primary colors: white, yellow, green, blue, red, and black. In addition, he put forth a color theory that introduced relativity into the perception of color, and provided the basis for a more subjective theory of chromatic perception

About the same time, romantic color theories developed, which focused more on the language of color, and its meanings and influences on life. These were more subjective theories that talked about the experience of perceiving color, rather than color as a compositional tool or status symbol.¹

• Fulvio Pellegrino Morato, in the sixteenth century with Del Significato de’ Colori (The Meaning of Colors)
• Ludovico Dolce, in the sixteenth century with Dialogue in which the Quality, Diversity and Property of Colors are Discussed
• Giovanni de Runaldi, in the sixteenth century with Most Monstrous Monster

There were also a number of more scientific theories of color that involved both science as a method of observation and optics:^{1, 3}

• Paracelsus, a Swiss physician and one of the most influential alchemists of the sixteenth century, developed a series of experiments involving mixing white, black, or red with sulphur and examining the chromatic gradations that came about due to the chemical reactions
• Bernardino Telesio, in the sixteenth century with De Colorum Generatione, introduced a criterion of observation based on similarity, difference, and the belief that everything material behaves according to the laws of matter
• Gerolamo Cardano made distinctions between principal colors by referencing them to the nature of crystals and gems as a means of color perception

By the end of the sixteenth century, there would be many additional works written about optics, with research by Maurolico, Galileo, Keples, Decartes, and others.

In the early seventeenth century, an Italian professor of medicine named Guido Antonio Scarmiglioni proposed that there were really only five simple colors: white and black, red, blue, and yellow. Robert Boyle, a chemist, echoed Scarmiglioni’s observations as did J. C. Le Blon sometime before the middle of the eighteenth century.³ These observations were the first attempts to set apart (subtractive) primary colors as being unique from other colors.

In 1704, Isaac Newton wrote Optiks, a book that changed everything. The principal aim of the work was to show that the refraction of light into the colors of the spectrum was a necessary phenomenon, and subsequently that the separate colors could be put back together as white light.

Newton developed a color wheel, which summed up the entirety of his theories on optics. From this point forward in the history of the world, color would no longer be seen as a mode of pictorial production, but rather as the transmission of light.¹

In direct opposition to the work of Newton was the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Goethe took a rather Aristotelian stance when it came to color, and declared that color was tied to both light and darkness. Light and darkness, when mixed together, produced gray, and therefore gray was the color that formed the basis of all other colors.

Goethe believed that color was understood through artistic effort and experience, rather than through the principles of science. He divided color into three categories:¹

• Physiological (psychological) colors mediated solely by a subject perceiving them
• Physical colors obtainable through optical phenomenon such as transparency, translucency, etc.
• Chemical colors that cannot be set apart from the processes used to make them, such as generation and mixture

Goethe’s primary contribution to color theory was his attention to the psychological aspects of color, such as his focus on subjective interpretation, the experience of color and the concept of polarities, which helped to establish the idea of complementary colors.³

Throughout the next few centuries, additional models of colorimetry would be built and the whole idea of color systems would come into its time. Some examples include:^{1, 2, 3}

• Johann Heinrich Lambert (1722) created a pyramid that would establish a basic trichromatic base

• Jakob Christoph Le Blon (1735) would build upon the work of Lambert with a geometric shape resembling a prism that displayed various colors according to the order of their tonal emission

• Johann Tobias Mayer (1745) developed a principle of chromatic inversion with two pyramids attached at their bases, consisting of a light upper vertex and a dark lower vertex

• Ignaz Schiffermuller (1772), from Versuch eines Farbensystems, designed a romantic color circle that was published in Vienna

• Charles Hayter (1826), from Compendium, which included a frontispiece of a color circle based around the work of Newton, Le Blon and Harris

• M. E. Chevreul (1839), from De la Loi du Contraste Simultane des Couleurs, developed a color wheel that is still used in art education today

• George Field (1845), from Chromatography, followed conventions set by Le Blon and Harris

• Charles Blanc (1867), from Grammaire des Arts du Dessin, developed a color star that emphasized primary and secondary relationships

• Auguste Laugel (1869), from L’Optique et les Arts, developed a system similar to the work of Blanc

All of these color systems formed the basis for what we know today as color theory, and would influence the work of more contemporary color theorists such as Munsell, Kandinsky, Ostwald, Klee, Kuppers, Arnheim, Itten, and Albers. These color theorists, their systems, models, and research, will be the focus of the next article.

Conclusion

In this first article, we have begun an exploration into the origins and history of color. The origins of color look back upon the earliest of civilizations, whose color choices were largely based on the raw materials found in the land around them. As time progressed, civilizations began to develop techniques for working with these raw materials.

The details of these techniques, including a number of basic chemical transformations, were written down in formularies. These formularies guided the hands of artists and craftsmen, and proved to be useful not only as the initial techniques to produce artifical colors for artists, but also as an initial set of teachings that sparked critical thinking about color.

The first true critical thinking about color occured during the Renaissance in Europe. A number of artists, chemists, and philosophers took it upon themselves to develop working theories about the nature of light and color. This came to a culmination in the early eighteenth century when Issac Newton proved that the refraction of light into colors was a necessary phenomenon.¹

Following this, dozens of color wheels and color systems were developed, and the subject of color theory would come into its own. Most, if not all, contemporary color theory inherits some of the discoveries found in the origins and history of color.

References

1. A History of Colors by Manlio Brusatin
2. History of Color in Painting by Faber Birren
3. Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color by Philip Ball
4. Color, Environment, & Human Response by Frank H. Mahnke
5. Color Atlas: A Practical Guide for Color Mixing by Harald Kuppers
6. The Color Compendium by Hope and Walch
7. Designer’s Color Manual by Tom Fraser and Adam Banks
8. The Art of Color by Johannes Itten
9. Interaction of Color by Josef Albers and Nicholas Fox Weber
10. Color; origin, systems, uses by Harald Kuppers

Related Topics: Web Design, Color, Basics