Chevreul began to experiment with putting color next to color, and discovered that when it was next to purple, white looked as different from purple as possible - it looked yellow, which is the opposite of purple. He discovered customers were complaining about the colors in the carpets - that the whites were yellowish, for instance. In the mid-19th century, a chemist named Michel Chevreul began creating dyes for the Gobelins carpet factory in Paris. Something else we have to take into consideration when talking about color is that we perceive a color differently, depending on what color is next to it. Analogous colors are next to each other on the color wheel, so they form families of color: red, orange and purple have red in common, and therefore are used differently together in art and design than colors in a triad that don't share a common hue. The triads are the colors 60 degrees apart on the wheel, like the primary and secondary colors. If you put blue next to any color at all - let's say a yellow - the yellow will look as orange as it can possibly be because it's next to the blue." Opposite colors look more themselves when they're next to each other. "Red and green, blue and orange, yellow and purple are all as different from each other as possible. "Colors opposite each other on the color wheel - these are also called complements - have an especially strong relationship," says Cooperman. It includes the primary colors: red, yellow and blue the secondary colors: green, orange and purple (each made by mixing two primary colors) and the tertiary colors, which are created by mixing primary and secondary colors next to each other on the wheel: red-orange, blue-green, yellow-green, and so on. Once he did that, a lot of mathematical relationships between colors became apparent.Īnd, with that little matter out of the way, Isaac Newton probably went to breakfast and later that day, moved on to inventing modern physics.Īfter Newton completed his work on the color wheel, many others had a go at describing the nature of color (including, but not limited to, the 19th century German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), but the 12-color wheel used in modern color theory is basically the same one Newton came up with.
He also noticed red and violet were similar (both contain red), so he twisted the band of color around to form a circle. After messing around with feeding the individual colored lights through other prisms, he came to the conclusion that white sunlight isn't really white at all, but a combination of all the individual colors. So, in a darkened room, Newton let a tiny bit of sunlight through a chink in a curtain, making the light diffract through a prism. Newton wanted to figure out where color actually comes from - he knew feeding white light through a prism would make the rainbow color pattern we all know and love on the opposite wall: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet (ROYGBIV, for short). You've seen the color wheel before: It's just a circle that looks like somebody took the rainbow and attached the red end to the violet end, which is basically what Isaac Newton did when he created the first color wheel in 1666.