Spectrum of colors

A colour wheel is a tool used to organise and visualise all the colours in the spectrum of light or pigments. The endpoint of the spectrum is bent towards each other forming a circle, thus making a colour wheel. This colour wheel shows the relationship between primary hues, complementary hues and secondary hues. In the field of art, a colour wheel of red, blue and yellow is very traditional. There are three primary colours: red, blue and yellow. These three cannot be created by mixing others.

Now, when talking about colors, pigments are also an extremely important factor in the color industry. Pigments are the colored materials which are often nearly or completely soluble in water whereas dyes are typically soluble in water in at least one stage of their existence. But pigments are inorganic and gyes are organic substances. Whenever, we discuss colors, we talk about their pigmentation, substances with higher pigmentation have more sustained, long lasting and effective color patterns. All these pigments also work on the basic RGB model and have a really broad range. Now pigments keep introducing in the color industry by mixing different colors such as tyrian purple, pompeiian red e.t.c

The first colour wheel was invented by Sir Issac Newton. Newton split white sunlight into orange, red, yellow, cyan, green and blue beams. After this, the two ends of the spectrum were joined to show the natural progression of colours. The first circular diagram of colours was given by him in 1666. Since then, a lot of scientists and artists have simulated different colour wheels.

For making a colour wheel, primary hues are kept equidistant to each other. Then a bridge is created by putting secondary and tertiary hues between them. Normally, three primary colours, three secondary colours and six intermediate colours are used to prepare one colour wheel. The intermediate colours are prepared by mixing one primary colour with either a primary or tertiary colour.

There are two colour theories:

Additive colour theory: In this theory, the colour wheel has RGB (Red, Green, Blue) as primary additives. Sometimes, RGV (Red, Green, Violet) is used instead. Under this theory, white sunlight is used to radiate all the light and black radiates no light at all. The process of capturing and radiating the light is used by light-emitting media, thus using the additive colour theory. Here all the primaries mixed together give white colour. This theory is used in television, computer monitors, theatres and video production.
Subtractive colour theory: The typical colour wheel of an artist consists of different pigments which include blue, red and yellow as its primary colours. Secondary colours used here are orange, green, violet or purple and tertiary colours are yellow-orange, orange-red, green-yellow, blue-green, red-violet/purple and purple/violet-blue. Here, black colour absorbs most of the light and white only reflects the light. Thus according to this theory, light is absorbed by colour pigments and all colours other than the pigment colours. This theory is also known as pigment theory and is used in commercial printing and desktop.

Spectrum of colors

There are two colour theories:

References