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We often take color selection for granted. After all, how easy is it to choose a hue from the color picker in Photoshop? Although we might think nothing of it now, mankind didn’t always have the color wheel at its fingertips. It was the exploration by some of the world’s great thinkers and scientific advancement that lead to its development. And as you’ll see, during its many iterations, the color wheel was not only a wheel, but a sphere, triangle, and more. These are some of the most notable color creations; throughout history, other people have assembled their own “reshuffling of the rainbow.”
Ancient Color Palettes
The first color palettes were created 40,000 years ago by ancient people who created cave paintings. They produced pigment from what was around them—in this case, dirt, clay, or charcoal with a binder of spit or animal fat. These rudimentary palettes were limited in their hues and included earth pigments of red, yellow, and brown, as well as black from charcoal and burnt bones, and white from grounded calcite.
Color Evolves into Formal Color Theory (and the Color Wheel)
As artists continued to experiment with color, they evolved the pigments created by those before them. The color blue, for instance, was founded by the Egyptians when they figured out a process for producing permanent pigments from multiple minerals. With these new hues did not come a formal color theory, however. Color theory (not the color wheel) was first referenced during the Renaissance. Leone Battista Alberti is thought to have written it and laid the groundwork for the evolution of the color wheel.
Aron Sigfrid Forsius Creates the First Drawn Color Wheel
Aron Sigfrid Forsius [Public domain]
Through Forsius' studies, he concluded that colors could be arranged in a special order. His system used five main colors sandwiched between white and black. They were: red, yellow, green, blue, and gray. Each was graded as being closer to white or to black.
Sir Isaac Newton and Opticks
Isaak Newton (Photo: Wikimedia Commons [Public domain])
Newton detailed his findings in his 1704 book titled Opticks and created an early color wheel based on the combinations he witnessed through his prism experiment. He made a crucial decision in his work, and that was to connect the violet end of the spectrum and with the red end—essentially creating the first iteration of the color wheel that we know and love.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Own Theory of Color
Photo: Wikimedia Commons [Public domain]
Tobias Mayer and His Color Triangle
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (Photo: Wikimedia Commons [Public domain])
After Mayer’s color triangle was introduced, physicist Georg Christian Lichtenberg pared down the 12 colors to seven gradations per side.
Philip Otto Runge Imagines a Color Sphere
Philipp Otto Runge (Photo: Wikimedia Commons [Public domain])
Albert Henry Munsell and His 20th Century Model
Albert Henry Munsell brought the color wheel into the 20th century by constructing a color system that combined three-dimensionality with references to Newton’s theory. His model featured a three-dimensional cylinder that was graded from white to black with a ring that showed hues as well as an intersecting chroma that showed the possible combinations of them all.
Learning Color Theory
All of these iterations of the color wheel offer a different understanding of hues, and they highlight the exploration of the field throughout hundreds of years. As a creative person, it’s important that you understand how colors interact with and influence one another. (It will help you in your color mixing!) If you’re interested in learning more, pick up a copy of Color Problems by Emily Noyes Vanderpoel. The artist, scholar, and historian created her seminal text in 1903 in an attempt to make color theory available to everyone. She succeeded, and the text has recently been republished in a collaboration with The Circadian Press and Sacred Bones.
Prefer the online class setting? Richard Mehl teaches a color theory class through CreativeLive, as does Blake Rudis who gears his course towards photographers.
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Top 5 Free Color Palette Generators to Make Color Selection a Breeze
