The Colour Wheel

Colour Wheel based on Newton's one for my Magazine cover project.

  

Colour wheels are so traditionally part of the visual arts that we rarely immediately associate them to the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum; the science side of colour. Upon my internet visual research trip, while searching for things related to the colour wheel, I stumbled across this website which perfectly merged my love for art and science in the context of colour systems. One might assume colour wheels have their origins somewhere along art history but actually it was Newton who was attributed to being the the first to explore such a system. We're all probably familiar with the idea of a prism being able to separate and disperse white light into the 7 colours of the rainbow from highschool science. But what Newton noticed was that the ends of the spectrum could be connected to form a circle (a closed system) which led him to created his colour wheel - a spinning disk when spun at a high speeds would blur the colours and make them appear white to the eyes.

Diagram of Newton's ideas from Colorsystem

The website (Coloursystem) unravels the history and development of colour systems (as I said mentioned above) in both the context of art & science. I think what really drew me in was the lovely visual language of the diagrams which communicated this crossover of art and science really well; something I wanted to explore in the design of the colour issue of my Magazine cover project. This became the basis for the development of the visual language I had for the colour issue: scientific diagrams merging with the natural textures of traditional mediums of art like pencil, paint, & collage.

Energy & Eyes: Handmade Sun Collage set against two different colours to demonstrate the optical illusion.

As an afterthought, even though my initial concept was about colour as energy I realise now that perhaps what it could have evolved into is the idea of colour as perception which could allow the incorporation of an earlier concept I had of colour blindness. Colour is more complex than simply understanding how to mix their pigments or even by understanding the physics of its light nature, since it is more so the reading of the brain and the perception of the mind which bends the way we perceive and experience colour. Strange things can happen with optics and even though you might be looking at the same colour with the same wavelength and frequency, once you put against a different colour somehow that colour seems to turn into something else.

/Ham