
Color makes objects easier to see and it separates painting from drawing, bringing life and vibrancy to paintings and sketches. Every color creates different emotions and feelings, and certain colors are associated with specific feelings like warmth and others with being cool. Colors close to the red spectrum are warmer colors, and they include red, orange, and yellow. These warm colors evoke emotions ranging from warmth, comfort, optimism and energy to feelings that signal danger or make you feel angry and hostile. They can evoke higher arousal emotions, such as love, passion, happiness, and excitement. Whereas blue colors like purple and green are inked to calmness, sadness, indifference, relaxing, soothing and healing. These reactions are rooted in psychological effects, biological conditioning and cultural imprinting. Color is a fundamental physical property of light that humans perceive differently dependent on the individual person.
Greek color theory started with Aristotle saying that objects consist of a mixture of elements with colors that reproduce said mixture and that colors have the capacity to cause themselves to be seen. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, after the invention of new optical instruments people started to develop a better understanding about the nature of light. The science of optics improved, because many distinguished scientists wanted to understand more about light, color and the process of vision. Isaac Newton spent six years studding colors and he explained that a prism separates a beam of white light into the colors of the rainbow. Newton went as far as conducting an experiment on himself, while probing the nature of color. He stuck a bodkin, a long sewing needle with a blunt point, into his eye socket, to determine if colors were influenced by the eye. He named the seven colors of the spectrum red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. These names have stuck, although the choice of seven should be seen as conveniently sacred, rather than a precise description of the visible spectrum. Newton also described how each color of the spectrum merges gradually into its neighbor to give ‘hues’. The first color wheel was developed by Sir Isaac Newton consisting of an arrangement of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet on a rotating disk.
Physically, there are two kinds of colors: pure spectral colors and mixed colors. A pure spectral color consists of a beam of light that is a simple sine wave with a single wavelength. The wavelength of the light is the color of the light. Light is an electromagnetic radiation. An electric field oscillates in both time and space along with a corresponding orthogonal magnetic field that oscillates with the same spatial and temporal periodicity. The distance in space between the peaks of an electromagnetic wave determines its wavelength, and hence its color. Francis Bacon thought that color was not capable of being seen without light and he said, “All colors will agree in the dark”, believing that reliable and valid knowledge can only be acquired through sense-experience or observation. Color theory is a body of principles that provide guidance on the relationship between colors and the physiological impacts of certain color combinations. The color wheel shows the relationship between colors and since art is based on combining colors, an organized illustration of the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors is essential. Accurately combining colors, using the color wheel, and understanding how colors relate to each other are critical skills for artists, designers, marketers, and brand owners.
Most people dream in color, and about 12% will dream in black and white, but we forget the colors of our dreams when we wake up. It is thought that many people dream according to what they see on their TV set, whether it is a color set or a black & white TV set. Since most sets are in color now, more dreams contain color. Experts don’t really understand why we dream, but most of them believe that our dreams are a way for our subconscious mind to communicate with our conscious mind. We all have the ability to dream, but that does mean that we can control our dreams. Lucid dreaming is defined as being able to retain some level of conscious control of the dream events, but since this usually happens spontaneously it can be a difficult skill to learn for most people.
Written for Reena’s Xploration Challenge 262, where she gave us a picture and a phrase, and she asks us to determine if the prompt is the words “Random Dreams” or the image of the paint brushes.