Well, the sunshine_challenge may be over, but—looking over what I've written on the colours—I find I still have a bit more to say.

In the last post, on VIOLET, I took colours beyond the spectrum and round the colour wheel, finishing up where it all started, i.e. with RED. However, I had the devil of a job doing that last bit:

VIOLET					RED

Although the end points were fixed (and I knew that #FF00FF needed to be in the middle), I kept fiddling with the hex codes, tweaking them over and over in an attempt to get a smooth set of transitions. Even now, I'm not satisfied.

Thinking about it after the fact, though, I think I've put my finger on the problem. Something silveradept wrote:

It's interesting - when I imagine the platonic examples of colors (which usually involves a crayon box), almost all of the shades of the Newtonian spectrum are dark, with the exception of yellow,[...].

I grew up with a set of basic colours that were essentially derived from the subtractive primaries. Oh, there was RED (instead of magenta + yellow) and BLUE (instead of magenta + cyan); but, as one mixed more paints together, things got darker. People who think in terms of additive primaries—originally scientists in Optics, but nowadays particularly people dealing with computers—are accustomed to having colours get lighter as they're added together.

What this means in practice is that, instead of the sequence above, I ought to find it easier to get a gradation by using dark shades.

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