The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Coloring Finishing And Painting Wood
The areas covered by the two contrasting colors are often quite different in producing a harmony by contrast. (2) One or both of the colors may be subdued or grayed in a contrasting color-harmony. (3) The values of the colors in the contrasting pair may be varied enough to secure a pleasing tone balance. The values are changed by making the colors darker or lighter.
66. The Modern Theory of Color.—The old theory that red, yellow, and blue are the primary colors is still the basis for mixing colors in many trades and industries, and seems to be generally used in public schools. Modern scientists in experimenting with light-ray colors have come to the conclusion that light rays separate into red, green, and violet-blue as the basic or primary colors. Students of color, such as A. H. Munsell, use a five-point color-circle, with intermediate half steps.9 This new color-circle is made up of red, yellow, green, blue, and purple, with the intermediate colors, yellow-red, green-yellow, blue-green, purple-blue, and red-purple, Fig. 9.
Modern research has shown that no mixtures of other light rays will produce red, green, and violet-blue, and for this reason these three colors are called primary colors. Other colors can be produced by mixing light rays from the three colors: dark red, green, and violet-blue.
It must be remembered that mixing the rays of colored lights and mixing pigments or dyes are very different things. The spectral colors all come from white light, and they can be recombined into white light by the use of a second prism, which must be inverted and placed so as to gather the rays of light that have been dispersed into a spectrum by a similar prism, which originally broke up the white light into spectral colors.10 If pigments of the same spectral colors are mixed together, the result is not white, but gray. This shows plainly that we cannot mix pigmenicolors by the same methods that are used in combining light rays and secure similar results.
The complete list of contrasting colors can be made by observing the names of colors which are located at the opposite ends of the diameters of the circle.
The contrasting colors which are at the ends of the diameters of the ten-point color-circle are very pleasing. With the five basic colors—red, yellow, green, blue- and purple—other colors can be secured by mixing. The colorharmony is not quite the same as that obtained from the old theory of six colors with a twelve-point circle. According to this new theory the complementary color of red is blue-green; the complement of green is red-purple; and that of purple-blue is yellow.
