FA 103-01 Line Color & Design Color Theory Overview and History Color theory refers to the visual impact of color, the way colors mix and how we perceive color through organizing color space. The earliest reference to color theory is thought to be written by Leone Battista Alberti in 1435. Leonardo da Vinci also refers to color theory in his journals in the late 1400s. Color theory during this time revolves around the idea that there are three primaries colors - red, blue, and yellow - and that these three colors, when mixed together in specific ways create all other colors. This early Renaissance idea of color was how artist viewed and thought about color up until the mid to late 1600’s and early 1700’s when the age of Enlightenment brought in new scientific discoveries and experiments with optics. During the Enlightenment in Europe there was an explosion of color theory ideas. Philosophers of the late 17th and 18th centuries were obsessed with light and sight. Descartes wrote a treatise on optics, as did Newton. Newton’s Color Theory, ca. 1665 Newton’s rainbow forms the familiar ROYGBIV because he thought the range of visible colors should be analogous to the seven-note scale. Sir Isaac Newton developed the first color wheel when he expanded the theory in his 1704 work, Opticks. Around 1665, when Isaac Newton first passed white light through a prism and watched it fan out into a rainbow, he identified seven constituent colors—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet—not necessarily because that’s how many hues he saw, but because he thought that the colors of the rainbow were analogous to the notes of the musical scale. Naming seven colors to correspond to seven notes is “a kind of very strange and interesting thing for him to have done,” says Peter Pesic, physicist, pianist, and author of the 2014 book Music and the Making of Modern Science. “It has no justification in experiment exactly; it just represents something that he’s imposing upon the color spectrum by analogy with music.” http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/On-Descartes-Optics.php http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33504 http://www.peterpesic.com/ Of his rainbow experiment Newton wrote that he had projected white light through a prism onto a wall and had a friend mark the boundaries between the colors, which Newton then named. In his diagrams, which showed how colors corresponded to notes, Newton introduced two colors—orange and indigo—corresponding to half steps in the octatonic scale. Whether Newton’s friend delineated indigo and orange on the wall or whether Newton added those colors to his diagrams in order to better fit his analogy is unclear, Pesic says. In any case, Newton’s inclusion of those two colors had lasting consequences, Pesic wrote in his book: “For those who came after, Newton’s musical analogy is the source of the widely held opinion that orange and indigo are actually int ...

1. FA 103-01 Line Color & Design
Color Theory Overview and History
Color theory refers to the visual impact of color, the way colors
mix and how we
perceive color through organizing color space.
The earliest reference to color theory is thought to be written by
Leone Battista Alberti in 1435. Leonardo da Vinci also refers to
color theory in his
journals in the late 1400s. Color theory during this time
revolves around the idea that
there are three primaries colors - red, blue, and yellow - and
that these three colors,
when mixed together in specific ways create all other colors.
This early Renaissance
idea of color was how artist viewed and thought about color up
until the mid to late
1600’s and early 1700’s when the age of Enlightenment brought
in new scientific

2. discoveries and experiments with optics. During the
Enlightenment in Europe there was
an explosion of color theory ideas. Philosophers of the late 17th
and 18th centuries
were obsessed with light and sight. Descartes wrote a treatise on
optics, as did Newton.
Newton’s Color Theory, ca. 1665
Newton’s rainbow forms the familiar ROYGBIV because he
thought the range of visible
colors should be analogous to the seven-note scale.
Sir Isaac Newton developed the first color wheel when he
expanded the theory in his
1704 work, Opticks. Around 1665, when Isaac Newton first
passed white light through a
prism and watched it fan out into a rainbow, he identified seven
constituent colors—red,
orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet—not necessarily
because that’s how
many hues he saw, but because he thought that the colors of the
rainbow were
analogous to the notes of the musical scale. Naming seven
colors to correspond to
seven notes is “a kind of very strange and interesting thing for

3. him to have done,”
says Peter Pesic, physicist, pianist, and author of the 2014 book
Music and the Making
of Modern Science. “It has no justification in experiment
exactly; it just represents
something that he’s imposing upon the color spectrum by
analogy with music.”
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/On-Descartes-
Optics.php
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33504
http://www.peterpesic.com/
Of his rainbow experiment Newton wrote that he had projected
white light through a
prism onto a wall and had a friend mark the boundaries between
the colors, which
Newton then named. In his diagrams, which showed how colors
corresponded to notes,
Newton introduced two colors—orange and indigo—
corresponding to half steps in the
octatonic scale. Whether Newton’s friend delineated indigo and
orange on the wall or
whether Newton added those colors to his diagrams in order to
better fit his analogy is
unclear, Pesic says. In any case, Newton’s inclusion of those

4. two colors had lasting
consequences, Pesic wrote in his book: “For those who came
after, Newton’s musical
analogy is the source of the widely held opinion that orange and
indigo are actually
intrinsic in the spectrum, despite the great difficulty (if not
impossibility) of distinguishing
indigo from blue, or orange from yellow, in spectra.”
Although Newton’s color-music analogy falls apart, his prism
experiments showed that
white light is actually a mix of different-colored lights, and this
work was “a crucial step
toward understanding the nature of light more deeply,” Pesic
says. And even if you can’t
make out indigo in the rainbow, you probably know ROY-G-
BIV, which Pesic calls “a
conventional expression of (and homage to) Newton’s choice [to
name seven colors in
analogy to music]—even though almost everyone has forgotten
or did not know the odd
story of its origin.” 1

5. 1 Newton’s Color Theory Ca. 1665
By Ashley b. Taylor, The Scientist
Feb. 28, 2017
An illustration of Sir Isaac Newton’s color wheel. Newton
identified seven constituents’ colors—red,
orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet—not necessarily
because that’s how many hues he saw,
but because he thought that the colors of the rainbow were
analogous to the notes of the musical scale.
The musical notes are: A, B, C, D, E ,F, and G.
Color theory during the 18th and early 19th century expanded
into the sensory and
psychological effects of color. Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749 -
1832) developed a color
wheel that described the psychological effect of each color.
Blues give a feeling of

6. coolness while yellows create a feeling of warmth. Goethe’s
Theory of Colours (1810)
combines the objective reason of the 18th century
Enlightenment with the subjective
intuition of 19th century Romanticism. Goethe initiated his
theory with a critique of the
dominant color theory of the time: Newton’s Optics (1704). His
was the first
experimental proof of Galileo’s thesis, in which light was
supposed to be “in reality”
something mechanical and therefore quantifiable and a
measurable phenomenon.
A century later, Goethe argued color was not solely a physical
phenomenon, existing
only as a measurable property within light. Color was not a
segment within light, but a
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/08/17/goethe-
theory-of-colours/
http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=47
product of the harmonious mixture of light and dark. “Color
itself is a degree of
darkness,” and all color is half-light. As he concludes, the color
spectrum is not the

7. splitting of light but the convergence of lightness and darkness.
Goethe's color wheel, below, from Theory of Color, illustrates
his chapter on
"Allegorical, symbolic, and mystical use of color."
Goethe’s Color Wheel
The color wheel was one among many forms—which often
presented contrasting
theories, like that of Jacques-Fabien Gautier, who argued that
black and white were
http://wunderkammer.ki.se/assets/uploads/image/asset/168/large
_Gautier_dagoty_1746_colourplate.jpg
primary colors. But the wheel, and Newton’s basic ideas about
it, have endured almost
unchanged to today.
Here are some 18th century color wheels showing the vari ations
of thought on color
theory and organization.

8. Color wheel draw and painted by entomologist, Ignaz
Schiffermüller
British entomologist Moses Harris from 1776 shows Newton’s
7-color scheme simplified
to the 6 primary and secondary colors we usually see, arranged
in the complementary
and analogous scheme, with tertiary gradations between them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Harris
Color is always representative. Newton’s original wheel
included “musical notes
correlated with color.” By the end of the 18th century, color
theory had become
increasingly tied to psychological theories and typologies.
Goethe and Friedrich Schiller
designed a color wheel in 1789 to illustrate “human occupations

9. and character traits,”
including “tyrants, heroes, adventurers, hedonists, lovers, poets,
public speakers,
historians, teachers, philosophers, pedants, rulers,” grouped into
the four temperaments
of humoral theory.
Goethe and Friedrich Schiller’s Color Wheel of Human
Occupations and Character traits
http://munsell.com/color-blog/sir-isaac-newton-color-wheel/
http://munsell.com/color-blog/sir-isaac-newton-color-wheel/
Goethe and Friedrich Schiller’s Color Spheres

10. It’s a fairly short leap from these psychologies of color to those
used by advertisers and
commercial designers in the 20th century—or from the artists
and scientists’ color
theories to abstract expressionism, the Bauhaus school, and the
chemists and
photographers who recreated the colors of the world on film.
Blues give a feeling of coolness while yellows create a feeling
of warmth. For Interior
Designers, the psychological effects of color are a key
component when choosing
interior finishes. In the early and mid 20th century, color
theorists expanded color theory
to include color as it relates to pigments -inks, dyes, and paints,
rather than light. There
are more variants when dealing with pigments because pigments
may vary in hue,
value, and chroma. Hue referring to the actual color - red, blue,
or orange, value
referring to the lightness or darkness of a color, and chroma
referring to the intensity of
a color. These color theories are still in place today and still
refer to red, blue, and

11. yellow as the primary colors.
These color theories are still in place today and still refer to
red, blue, and yellow as the
primary colors. In the early 20th century Color Science Albert
Munsell, who was born in
Boston Massachusetts and attended and served on the faculty of
Massachusetts
Normal Art School (known today as Mass College of Art and
Design) was an American
painter and art teacher who developed the Munsell Color
System. Which is one of the
first Color Order Systems that is still used today in industrial
design and other industries
such as car manufacturing. The Munsell color system is a color
space that specifies
colors based on three properties of color: hue, value (lightness),
and chroma (color
purity). It was created by Professor Albert H. Munsell in the
first decade of the 20th
century and adopted by the United States Department of
Agriculture (USDA) as the
official color system for soil research in the 1930s.

12. Several earlier color order systems had placed colors into a
three-dimensional color
solid of one form or another, but Munsell was the first to
separate hue, value, and
chroma into perceptually uniform and independent dimensions,
and he was the first to
illustrate the colors systematically in three-dimensional space.
Munsell's system,
particularly the later re-notations, is based on rigorous
measurements of human
subjects' visual responses to color, putting it on a firm
experimental scientific basis.
Because of this basis in human visual perception, Munsell's
system has outlasted its
contemporary color models, and though it has been superseded
for some uses by
models such as CIELAB (L*a*b*) and CIECAM02, it is still in
wide use today.
The system consists of three independent properties of color
which can be
represented cylindrically in three dimensions as an irregular

13. color solid:
• hue, measured by degrees around horizontal circles
• chroma, measured radially outward from the neutral (gray)
vertical axis
• value, measured vertically on the core cylinder from 0 (black)
to 10 (white)
Munsell determined the spacing of colors along these
dimensions by taking
measurements of human visual responses. In each dimension,
Munsell colors are as
close to perceptually uniform as he could make them, which
makes the resulting shape
quite irregular. As Munsell explains:
“Desire to fit a chosen contour, such as the pyramid, cone,
cylinder or cube, coupled
with a lack of proper tests, has led to many distorted statements
of color relations, and it
becomes evident, when physical measurement of pigment values
and chromas is
studied, that no regular contour will serve.”
— Albert H. Munsell, “A Pigment Color System and Notation”

14. In the Munsell color system there 10 hues instead of 12 that
move through color space
using a fractional system. Color is organized by its hue (color),
value (light to dark), and
chroma (the intensity of a color). A simple number system was
assigned to both the
value and chroma of all the hues in the Munsell color wheel.
This made identifying color
exactly very easy and was one reason that industries such as
care manufacturing
started to use this system. It made color matching easy and
accurate.
Munsell Color System Chart

15. Diagram of the Munsell Color System
Munsell Color System

16. This section is an overview of color theory and terms
The three dimensions of color:
Hue: The term “hue” refers to pigment in the realm of color
theory. This technically
defined as “the degree to which a stimulus can be described as
similar to or different
from stimuli that are described as red, green, blue, and yellow.”
Hue can essentially be
thought of as the basic color, tint, or shade as defined by the
color wheel.

17. Value: Value is synonymous with “lightness” when used in
regard to color theory. This
is a representation of variation in the perception of a color’s
overall brightness.
If the hue of a color is “blue”, then the value determines if the
color description could be
“light blue” (high value) or “dark blue” (low value).
Chroma: Chroma, commonly referred to as “saturation”, refers
to the perceived
intensity of a specific color along the color wheel. A higher
chroma will result in greater
“colorfulness” or richness of the color as perceived by the end
user. Lower chroma thus
results in a more subtle, dull color.
Primary Colors: Red, Yellow, and Blue: In classical color
theory, primary colors are
the three hues that cannot be formed by any combination of
other colors. Thus, the
defining element of primary colors is that they cannot be
created by combining any
other pigments on the color wheel. That said the use of the word

18. primary does not mean
they are absolute. You can’t mix white nor a good black with
the red, yellow and blue.
The word primary is subjective in context to color space and the
visual world it is used
to illustrate.
Secondary Colors: Green, Orange, and Violet: Used in design
and color theory just
as often as primary colors, secondary colors can be created by
mixing two primary
colors together.
Tertiary Colors: There are six main tertiary colors on the
modern color wheel. As
defined by modern color theory, these are yellow-orange, red-
orange, red-purple, blue-
purple, blue-green & yellow-green. Each tertiary color has a
hyphenated name because
they are created by mixing one primary and one secondary color
together.

19. Color Harmony: With an understanding of essential terms and
the various hues
defined by the color wheel, we can begin to employ color
harmoniously. In color theory,
harmony refers to different color combinations that can be
utilized in an aesthetically
pleasing manner. This is where color theory is finally put into
practice through design
and composition. You may have heard the term “complementary
colors” before.
However, this should not be confused with the idea of colors
that “compliment” each
other well. In color theory, “complementary” is a specific term
referring to combined
hues used in a design scheme.
Complementary Colors: A design with complementary colors
employs two pigments
that are directly opposite each other on the color wheel. By
using two colors with the
greatest visual contrast, each hue is made more vivid as a res ult.
This simple form of
color harmony is the most commonly understood in color theory
and widely used in

20. visual composition. A subset of complementary color harmony
is the “split-
complementary” design. In contrast to complementary colors,
this color scheme is
defined by one of the two contrasting hues being split into
analogous colors for greater
color variation.
Triadic Colors: Color triads use three colors that are equidistant
to one another on the
color wheel. These designs are more complex than
complementary colors but are
based on the same principle. By employing 3 hues that are
farthest away from each
other on the color wheel, a striking visual contrast is created.
Examples of color triads
include primary colors and secondary colors.

21. Analogous Colors: Are colors that are next to each other on the
color wheel.
Or related color harmonies, are defined by the implementation
of one main “root” color
and two or more colors that are close in proximity on the color
wheel. This is a very
basic and reliable way to create a visually appealing
composition. Furthermore,
analogous color designs can be combined with complementary
colors and a myriad of
other harmonies for diverse chromatic effects.

22. 12 section color wheel