What is color theory? Discuss about the mixing of color in color wheel?
Answer: A Color Wheel or color circle is an abstract illustrative organization of color hues around a circle that shows relationships between primary colors, secondary colors, complementary colors. A color wheel is a visual representation of colors arranged according to their chromatic relationship. Begin a color wheel by positioning primary hues equidistant from one another, then create a bridge between primaries using secondary and tertiary colors.
As an illustrative model, artists typically use red, yellow, and blue primaries (RYB color model) arranged at three equally spaced points around their color wheel. Printers and others who use modern subtractive color methods and terminology use magenta, yellow, and cyan as subtractive primaries. Intermediate and interior points of color wheels and circles represent color mixtures. In a paint or subtractive color wheel, the “center of gravity” is usually (but not always) black, representing all colors of light being absorbed; in a color circle, on the other hand, the center is white or gray, indicating a mixture of different wavelengths of light (all wavelengths, or two complementary colors, for example).
The arrangement of colors around the color circle is often considered to be in correspondence with the wavelengths of light, as opposed to hues, in accord with the original color circle of Isaac Newton. Modern color circles include the purples, however, between red and violet. Color scientists and psychologists often use the additive primaries, red, green and blue; and often refer to their arrangement around a circle as a color circle as opposed to a color wheel.
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Color Theory:
In the visual arts, 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. Although color theory principles first appeared in the writings of Leone Battista Alberti and the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, a tradition of “colory theory” began in the 18th century, initially within a partisan controversy around Isaac Newton’s theory of color and the nature of so-called primary colors. From there it developed as an independent artistic tradition with only superficial reference to colorimetry and vision science.
Mixing of Color in Color Wheel:
Why are artists special? Ask any artist to explain how color works, and they’ll launch into a treatise about how the Three Primary Colors: red, blue, and yellow form a color “wheel:”.
Why “wheel?” All other colors are created by mixing these three colors in certain proportions, they’ll explain. In particular, mixing equal quantities of each pair of Primary Colors produces the Secondary Colors (orange, green, and purple):
Continuing this process produces the infamous color wheel you probably learned in school; a pretty, symmetrical, satisfying device in which each hue melds seamlessly and linearly into the next:
Unfortunately, none of this stands up to even minor scrutiny. For example, open up your desktop printer and you’ll see something quite different:
Three colors of ink which, when combined, produce all others: cyan, magenta, and yellow. (Black is included as a money-saver — black is the cheapest and most common color; it’s cheaper to have a black cartridge than to dump ink from the other three.) But wait! I thought the “Primary” colors were red, blue, and yellow, not cyan (bluish-green), magenta (bluish-red), and yellow. So this is a different set of three colors which are “Primary,” yet still generate color wheels containing all the other colors. So what does the “Primary” designation really mean?
Also it’s not as simple as saying “any three colors can produce all the others” because that’s clearly not true (by experiment). And it’s not as simple as saying “any three colors will do, they just have to be equally spaced around the color wheel,” because yellow is common to both the painter’s and printer’s wheel, yet the other two primaries differ completely (red and blue are primary in the painter’s wheel but secondary in the printer’s wheel.)
TVs and computers are different yet again. If you stand close to a CRT (non-flat-screen), you can see that every pixel (or “dot”) is really three tightly-packed colored phosphors: red, green, and blue.
If you’ve done computer graphics you’ve been forced to name colors using these “RGB color values;” true geeks automatically think “yellow” when they see #FFFF00. (If it’s intuitive to you that #A33F17 is burnt orange, you are indeed a God among men. I’m looking at you, @soopa.) This leads to yet another system of three “Primary” colors generating all the others, and another color wheel. This one is a little easier to explain — ink and paint are subtractive (adding cyan, magenta, and yellow yields black) whereas colored light is “additive” (meaning if you blast red, green, and blue you get white):
Still, we have yet another color wheel in which two (but not all three!) “primaries” match those of the artist’s wheel and none match those of the printer’s wheel.
