Colour
From SourceryForge
This article is meant to be the central access point for all articles about or related to colour. Naturally, it looks more like a link farm than like an actual article. It should stay that way, so that the links won't get lost in blocks of text. It is designed to be a bit of an eye catcher, but unfortunately this makes it a bit hard to edit for wiki novices. If you want to add something and are not sure how to, just leave your text/ links/ suggestions on the talk page, someone will put them into the article then.
Contents |
What is colour?
In colloquial use, colours are what we percieve as red, blue, yellow, and so on. Physically, these represent certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation that are visible for humans, called visible light, But in fact, visible light is not fundamentally different from non-visible light. Ultraviolet light has a shorter wavelength than what is visible for us, many animals such as many insects in fact can see it. Infrared light has a longer wavelength than visible light and is generally percieved as warmth. Some animals, snakes namely, have specific organs for percieving it, but it is doubful if they "see" it or percieve it in another way.
The perception of colour is not defined by their physical wavelength, but by our receptors for it, and what our brain makes of that input. Humans have two kinds of receptors. Rods and cones. Rods only percieve intensity of light, no matter what wavelength. They are able to operate at much lower light levels than cones, so in darkness everything appears grey. Cones come in three kinds, called short or blue, middle or green, and long or red. These three types of cones define the three primary colours.
If light is fundamentally different from energies of still other wavelengths, such as electromagnetic waves proper or sound is still somewhat debated, but light does have some unique features.
general articles
Articles about specific colours
| Yellow | Blue | Red | non-colours | Colour combinations |
| The color of sunshine, gold and richness, but also of jealousy and cowardice | The calm colour of the sky and oceans | The colour of love and hate, blood and passion, sex and death | The colours of mourning, sadness, inertness, but also purity | Colour combinations that are relevant to Kabbalah or other occult systems |
| Green | violet | orange | brown | |
| The colour of plants nature and fertility, but also of poison | The colour of spirituality and dignity | The colour of warmth and joy | The colour of fertile soil, but also of fall and decay | |
Articles about Art and other wayside attractions
- Johannes Itten, one of the pioneers of colour theory and its use in art
Web resources
General stuff
- colour symbolism in buddhism
- colour symbolism in buddhist art
- all about pigments, especially traditional ones
- colour symbolism in the bible
- many articles on colour theory, use of colours in printing and assorted topics
- more than you ever wanted to know about the physics of colour, light and vision
Useful wikipedia articles
Wikipedia has lots of good articles about the more objective side of colours, such as physics, and biological and physiological theories about colour and colour perception. There's no need to reproduce them here, but they are certainly worth reading when researching colour and related topics. Here only the more central ones are mentioned, they link to much more.
| About colour theory and similar stuff | About colour perception and related stuff |
| their central article on colour | the biology behind seeing |
| all about light | specifics about the biology behind seeing colours |
| about light visible for humans | Aura-Soma, an alternative healing system based on colour |
| colour theory | about telling green from blue |
| primary colour | |
| complementary colour |
