greerwatson
Well, the [community profile] 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 [personal profile] 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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greerwatson


With violet we come to the last hue in the visible spectrum, which is to say:



(Which was named for the colour of the flowers of Viola odorata.)

To me, violet is a shade of PURPLE. That is to say, "purple" is one of the basic colour words in English; and the word refers to a broad range of colours in the same way that BLUE, RED, YELLOW, and GREEN do—though PURPLE is not quite as basic a colour as those, being more on a par with ORANGE and TURQUOISE.

I would not, however, say that violet is focal PURPLE, i.e. the most perfect, ideal shade of PURPLE. That, to me, is a shade slightly more to the BLUE end of the spectrum:





Or, to put it another way, the perfect shade of PURPLE lies between indigo and violet: indigo is the colour transitional between PURPLE and BLUE; and violet lies at the far end of the spectrum. (Beyond that lies ultraviolet, which can't be seen by the human eye.)






BLUE
INDIGO
PURPLE
VIOLET



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greerwatson


Given that I've already done TURQUOISE (Newton's "blue") and BLUE (Newton's "indigo"), what's left for INDIGO?

Well, the plant produces a blue-purple dye; and the colour is usually described as lying between blue and purple. So what's that?






Some might call this simply BLUE, especially if it presented in contrast with YELLOW, RED, and GREEN:









If, however, we compare it with BLUE and PURPLE (what I think of a a perfect PURPLE), then we can see it lies in between:








What we're looking at here is, I think, a sort of transitional colour: one that lies on the border between two basic colours. In the same way, GOLD is transitional between ORANGE and YELLOW; and CHARTREUSE is transitional between GREEN (especially lime green) and YELLOW.
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greerwatson


This fifth Sunshine Challenge is for the colour blue. But what is "blue"?

I'm one of those people who sees a distinct colour between green and [what I call] blue. This intermediate colour has various names: printers call it "cyan"; and a lot of computer types very imaginatively call it "blue-green". Some people use the words "teal" or "aqua"; but, to me, these are more specific terms. (I'd use teal only for darker shades, and aquamarine for lighter ones.) To me, the general term is TURQUOISE, which is also what I'd name the focal hue, i.e. the ideal, perfect shade of the colour.

TURQUOISE lies between GREEN and BLUE:





So, from my perspective, in going straight from "green" to "blue", the Sunshine Challenge is leaving a colour out.

Oops.

But opinions differ. Is TURQUOISE really a separate colour? When I was a little kid, it never occurred to me that it wasn't. I only realized that not everyone agreed when I was in the second half of Grade Four. It was the day when our teacher, Mrs Smith, decided to give us a lesson in colour terms.
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greerwatson


As someone who likes green, I look at it in comparison with other colours, and I think it gets sadly short-changed. I mean, just consider this:



YELLOW    





    YELLOW



ORANGE    




    GREEN



RED    




    GREEN



BROWN    




    GREEN





I mean, sure, we have names for the different greens. I'd call the lighter one "lime" and the muted one "olive". But they are still considered to be types of green. Read more... )
 
 
 
 
greerwatson


Orange is one of my favourite colours, along with brown, which is derived from it. I think rust/copper/tawny shades are probably my absolute favourite. In fact, when I bought a little rust-coloured velvet cushion once, and my mother said, "But you've got cushions," I just pulled it out and she said, "Oh, of course you bought it: it's Greer-coloured."


We all learn young that RED + YELLOW = ORANGE. In the limited palette of a child's paint box, we also find that this is true in practice as well as theory. It ain't always true! I mean, try mixing red and blue to make purple: given the shades available to most kids, all you ever get is purplish mud.


It has always puzzled me, though, why so many colour charts and rainbow sequences (say on flags or in ads) show as "orange" a colour that is very much closer to red than yellow. Often, it's almost red! You'd think they'd pick a shade that is bang in the middle.

Instead, all too often, it looks more like this:





Now, obviously if you compare the middle colour to red, it looks "un-red":





But, if you put it side by side with the yellow without red for contrast, then it actually looks more like a light red. Certainly, it's far redder than anything I'd call a true orange.





Surely, what you want to use for "orange" is a shade that contrasts equally either way. You want something that is clearly different when compared with red:





And also clearly different when compared with yellow:





So why do people so often use a very dark orange in making rainbows and colour wheels and the like?

Isn't this how it should be?