Color Lines: What is Color?

by Carlos Mireles

Pencil-Color-SpectrumColor is a beautiful thing! Color is all around us in multiple combinations, tones and variations. Color is in the sun, the sky, your clothes or even in your eyes. Although intangible, colors have a surprising affect on our mood or emotional state. You see, to us humans, color represents emotions and as much as color makes us “feel” something color really comes from the spectrum of light. Any and all colors give off electromagnetic radiation, a frequency different and specific to each color variation.  So then, the color red has it’s own frequency, like a finger print, which is different from the frequency of it’s close cousin, pink. This is true for every single color imaginable.

For the most part, all humans see the same colors similarly, but there are some that will see the same color slightly different whether it be by a tone or shade of color. This means that certain people’s eyes are “calibrated” or “tuned” slightly different from others. Unless you are color blind, most people will agree to seeing vary similar colors. Interesting to note, humans can see millions of color possibilities.

So the next time you decide to change or add color to a room, your wardrobe or anything requiring color consider using combinations for eye pleasing results. The simplest way of making sure you pick the right colors is to copy them. Most advertising and marketing material use the expertise of designers who will have already picked out correct color combinations. An alternative way of picking out colors is by using a color wheel and learning a little about color theory; with it you can derive at many different color combinations. Below is additional color information:

Color Wheel

 

 

 

  • Monochromatic: in simplest terms, monochromatic colors are different shades of one color
  • Triads: these are any three color hues equally spaced around the color wheel
  • Analogous: is a color scheme when any three adjacent color hues are use together
  • Complementary: is any color paired with its complement
  • Split-Compliments: this is done by beginning with one color hue and combine it with the two colors on either side of its complement

The psychology of color is deep in research. A person’s mood can be altered at the blink of an eye by color. One should keep that in mind the next time they use color in decorating a room, office or space. Below is an excellent info. graph regarding this topic:

 

 

Learn more about Color Theory below:

Wikipedia

ColorMatters.com

Google

Bing

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