OUGD104 - Colour Theory (03.11.09)

On Tuesday started learning about colour theory. We learnt about the different colour modes and hue, saturation, tone etc. It was quite interesting.

Subtractive and Additive Colours

Subtractive colours refer to inks and are made up of cyan, magenta and yellow. When all three are combined they create black or key (CMYK). When two of these colours overlap they create additive colours. Additive colours work in light such as computer screens and are made up of red, green and blue (RGB). When all three of these are combined they create white. When two of these overlap they create subtractive colours.

The Colour Wheel

The Colour Wheel starts with the primary colours (red, yellow and blue) which cannot be made by any other colour. The secondary colours (violet, green and orange) are made through combining 2 appropriate primary colours. When you combine different levels of 1 primary and 1 secondary you get tertiary colours (blue violet, yellow green, orange red).

Complimentary Colours

Complimentary colours refer to the tertiaries on the colour wheel. They are opposites and compliment each other, when seen together they do not fight for attention and when alone, out eyes search out the complimentary colour.

For the lesson we had to bring in a load of red objects. We got into our colour groups and our task was to organise the colours in an order. My group decided to show the spectrum. Starting at orange and going towards pink. We found that red was quite a difficult colour to do this with and when we looked around, the green group had much more scope than we did. It seems some colours have a broader range of hue than others. It was quite a good task and really made me realise that even though something is red, there are MANY reds out there...

PANTONE

I have used Pantone in the past when working in Design teams and really like that everything is universal. You know what you will get when printed. We got another task which was to match 10 of our items to Pantone swatches. This was tricky! As there are so many swatch books and we were limited to only 2, even though we had alot of different materials. Maybe it would have been easier if we could match to the whole range of books, then we could get the right textures etc... But it worked alright and we managed to closely match all 10 items...