FOREWORD: COLOUR MADE DIFFICULT

This website presents an account of the dimensions of colour and light perception, written for painters using either traditional or digital mediums. The conceptual framework presented here was developed as a component of Colour, Light and Vision, a course in the theory and practice of colour for artists that I have been presenting for around ten years at the Julian Ashton Art School, Sydney.

This account was begun over a year ago as a short tutorial intended for the forum of conceptart.org. Although much more could still be added on almost every page, I think that the site now presents a reasonable introduction to the subject promised by the title. There is no intention of presenting here a complete guide to colour in painting: it is specifically the ways in which thinking in terms of the dimensions of colour benefits the painter that is the focus here. Similarly, the site is not meant to provide encyclopaedic coverage of all aspects of colour and light, although I will review some frequently misunderstood topics in these areas before looking at the dimensions in detail.

I may well have succeeded in presenting here a work that will seem both too technical to many practising and student painters, and excessively simplistic to colour specialists. To the latter I can offer only my apologies, but to the former I would say that creating effects of light in a painting, particularly from the imagination, is a technical as well as an artistic problem. What I am presenting here is really no more complicated than a decent introductory text on any other technical aspect of painting, such as, for example, perspective.

Relatively little here is really new, but much of it is lost at present amid a great deal of confusion and misinformation about colour. For example, at the time I write, despite the precise and fundamental distinction drawn between the concepts of chroma and saturation by some current and earlier writers, most still ignore such niceties, and use the two terms interchangeably. Some authors treat the red, yellow and blue artists' primary colours as unquestioned fact, others insist that the "real" primary colours are yellow, magenta and cyan, and others again assert that the whole concept of primary colours for paints is a "useless fiction"; all three of these extreme positions are somewhat wide of the mark. It has been known since the late nineteenth century that opposing or complementary relationships between hues differ depending on whether we are talking about the mixing of light, the mixing of paint, or how we experience colour, which necessitates using a different hue circle or "colour wheel" for each kind of question. Yet most authors discuss colour in relation to just one or other of these hue circles, or worse still, in relation to the traditional "artist's colour wheel", which is inaccurate for all of three kinds of question. Most seriously of all, some of the fundamental principles for applying the dimensions of colour to understanding and painting effects of light, though in print since the 1920's, appear to be almost forgotten today.

An unfortunate consequence of this state of affairs is that many individuals with a little more knowledge than the dismal average seem to find it hard not to imagine themselves to be colour experts. I hope I have avoided this syndrome myself, and I offer this work in the hope that others by their comments and criticisms will assist its author in its continual improvement. I would be very grateful to be advised of any errors, either by email, or on the accompanying discussion thread on conceptart.org. The work has already benefited from discussions over many years with my students in Colour, Light and Vision. Any errors that the author has persisted in of course remain his sole responsibility.

Warmest thanks of all go to the "Dimensions of Colour team", Xavier Peria, Ray Kristanto, Noopur Patel, Atania Trinata, and Debolina Bandyopadhyay from the second year Multimedia course at the Billy Blue School of Graphic Arts, Sydney, and their teacher Dave Agius, for creating the site, including all of the interactive animations, and to Ben ("sciboy") Green for generously hosting the site.

Interactive demonstration of additive colour mixing. Drag the top, middle and bottom triangular yellow sliders to the left to control the brightnesses of the red, green and blue spotlights respectively. Copyright David Briggs and Ray Kristanto, 2007.

Unless otherwise indicated, all material on this website is copyright David Briggs, 2007-8, and is licensed for personal and commercial use under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia license. Use of the content of this website in whole or in part for any kind of educational purpose will attract a fee consisting entirely of one email to the author stating (if applicable) the name of the institution, subject and teacher, and the nature of the use of the material (e.g. handouts, recommended reading, etc.).

David Briggs
Sydney

November 2007

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.

Next: Part 1: The Dimensions of Colour