An Element of Art: COLOR
www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/rainbow.html
We will study Color first because it is one of the Elements of Art that we will use in our first project (posters).
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Rainbows are seen because there are water droplets in the air, and the droplets act as millions of prisms that separate the light...the same way you can see a rainbow over Niagara Falls or a Sprinkler in your backyard or even a puddle of oil in the street.
Let's examine the color in a rainbow:
Pure sunlight may appear white to us, but it consists of all visible colors. As soon as a ray of sunlight enters a water droplet, it is split up into its components, causing its colors to fan out and become visible as a spectrum of colors. This happens both when the ray enters the droplet and when it leaves the droplet again. A rainbow forms when each tiny droplet of water disperses sunlight. The pattern of light is always the same in a primary rainbow because each color is reflected at its own particular wavelength. In a primary rainbow, the colors will be in the order of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
Lets examine Light:
earthsky.org/space/what-is-the-electromagnetic-spectrum
The electromagnetic waves your eyes detect – visible light – oscillates between 400 and 790 terahertz (THz). That’s several hundred trillion times a second. The wavelengths are roughly the size of a large virus: 390 – 750 nanometers (1 nanometer = 1 billionth of a meter). Our brain interprets the various wavelengths of light as different colors. Red has the longest wavelength, and violet the shortest. When we pass sunlight through a prism, we see that it’s actually composed of many wavelengths of light. The prism creates a rainbow by redirecting each wavelength out a slightly different angle.
What is a color wheel?
Artists use this wheel because it helps them choose colors when they do Artwork. The colors are in the same order as the rainbow so they are arranged by the frequency number they vibrate at, and one color is effected by the color next to it; for instance, orange is between yellow and red and is therefore made up of the yellow and red.
Color Worksheets; Our color worksheets will help you separate the primary colors from the whole wheel.
First and foremost, the Primary Colors; Yellow, Red and Blue, are at the top or FIRST of any color structure. That's because you can think of the three Primaries as the original parents of all the future generations of colors. In Theory, Primary Colors are the root of every other color. So in other words, you could conceivably mix gazillions of colors with only three pure Primary pigments of Yellow, Red and Blue. You cannot get a pure red-magenta, blue-cyan or yellow by mixing other colors together when you work with artists paint or color mediums.Next come the three Secondary colors, Orange, Purple and Green. Think of the Secondary colors as the children of the three Primaries as shown above. In color theory we are taught that the Secondary colors are mixed like this:
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