Learning the Vocabulary of Color
"Delacroix |the nineteenth-century French artist Eugene Delacroix] was perfectly familiar with the complementary circle: he sketched one on a drawing of about 1839 and towards the end of his life seems to have kept a painted version in his studio."
"Delacroix |the nineteenth-century French artist Eugene Delacroix] was perfectly familiar with the complementary circle: he sketched one on a drawing of about 1839 and towards the end of his life seems to have kept a painted version in his studio."
M. Platnauer, Classical Quarterly 15, 1921
^^^^ ince language plays an important role in color, » simply being able to use the vocabulary of color
^ is immensely helpful in seeing, naming, and mixing colors. The basic vocabulary, derived from color theory, consists of fewer than a dozen essential terms. I present these terms in this chapter, and I urge you to learn and memorize them. The purpose is to set in your mind the language structure of color developed over the centuries by artists and color theorists. This will help you to understand and put into practice the fundamental principles of seeing and using color.
The goddess of memory in Greek mythology was Mnemosyne (pronounced ni-mo-sen-ee). Her name has come down to us as the word mnemonic, meaning "memory aid." The color wheel is a truly valuable memory aid for artists, who often keep one tacked up in the studio for quick reference. For the rest of this book, the color wheel will be our mnemonic, and, because of its importance, you will construct one in chapter 5. This may sound like a return to sixth grade, but, again, remember its origin in Newton's great intellect.
Color expert John Gage has written that when Newton "rolled up" the rainbow hues into a circle (Figure 3-1), he brought two powerful ideas into being: First, color relationships are more easily visualized and memorized when arranged in a circle,- second, that with colors so arranged, the inherent, locked-in relationships of the spectral hues are evident—the similarity of colors adjacent to each other on the wheel, and the contrast of colors opposite each other. These newly perceived relationships gave rise to the vocabulary of color still used today.
For example, the technical terms that describe Newton's similarity and contrast are, respectively, analogous hues (colors next to each other on the wheel) and complementary hues (colors pairs opposite each other on the wheel). These very useful terms are of prime importance, but, to understand them, we first need to identify the three basic sets of colors that make up the twelve-hue color wheel: the primaries, the secondaries, and the tertiaries.
- Fig. j-x. Newton's color circle from his Opticks, book I, part II, London, 1704.
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