9 Colour in Visual Art and Design

Colour and Light in Painting

Useful glossaries and lexicons (MITRA)

• https://www.artcons.udel.edu/mitra/Documents/Useful-Glossaries-and-Lexicons.pdf 

• Great collection of links to glossaries and lexicons of terms related to artwork conservation, painting, printmaking, photography, glass and ceramics.

ColourLex: art and science (Juraj Lipscher) 

• http://colourlex.com/

• Website centered on the common ground between science and art. The first part consists of information on paintings with an emphasis on their pigment analyses, the second consists of pages about the individual pigments, the third is concerned with scientific methods devoted to the investigation of paintings, and the last part is a collection of resources

Color vision and art (Webexhibits).

• http://webexhibits.org/colorart/

Chroma Picture (Alain Huet)

• https://chromapicture.com/index-en.html

• The website very nicely displays the colour gamut of selected paintings ranging from antiquity through to the present based on CIE L*C*h and allows users to upload their own images for online analysis.

Pope, Arthur, Tone relations in painting (1922)

• http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924016785028

• A student of Denman Ross who used Ross's classification of colour as a three-dimensional framework for describing colour appearance for painters. Ross showed that hue pages could be divided up according to what he called (in different editions of his text) saturation/purity and energy of vibration/brilliance. Later editions include The Language of Drawing and Painting (1949).

Frank Reilly, The Reilly papers (ed. John Ennis)

• http://ennisart.blogspot.com/2011/08/sunlit-color.html (and succeeding entries)

• Art Lessons from the hand-written lecture notes of Frank J. Reilly, a highly influential American teacher from the mid-20th century, who devised an elaborate system of representational painting based on the Munsell system. By John Ennis. 

The dimensions of colour - Part 10, Principles of colour for painters (David Briggs)

• http://www.huevaluechroma.com/101.php 

• http://www.huevaluechroma.com/102.php

• http://www.huevaluechroma.com/103.php

• http://www.huevaluechroma.com/104.php

• http://www.huevaluechroma.com/105.php

• http://www.huevaluechroma.com/106.php

• http://www.huevaluechroma.com/107.php

Colour constancy illusions and painting (David Briggs, 2018)

• https://youtu.be/ob8uPzHVrY8

• Striking illusions published by neuroscientists Dale Purves and Beau Lotto illustrate a basic practical difficulty involved in painting visual appearance. 

Colour tools for painters (Paul Centore)

• http://www.munsellcolourscienceforpainters.com/

Gurneyjourney (James Gurney)

• gurneyjourney.blogspot.com.au

Learning to see (Paul Foxton)

• http://www.learning-to-see.co.uk/ 

• https://www.youtube.com/user/PaulFoxton/videos 

• Paul Foxton's blog posts and linked webinar recordings thoroughly document an approach to applying the Munsell framework to representational painting, that involves visual matching to Munsell chips.

Douglas Flynt fine artist (Douglas Flynt)

• https://douglasflynt.blogspot.com/2010/04/anatomy-of-light-on-form.html

• https://douglasflynt.blogspot.com/2010/05/optical-and-conceptual-components-of.html

• https://douglasflynt.blogspot.com/2010/05/anatomy-of-light-on-form-part-ii.html

• https://douglasflynt.blogspot.com/2010/06/link-between-value-and-chroma.html

• https://douglasflynt.blogspot.com/2010/06/update-on-link-between-value-and-chroma.html

• https://douglasflynt.blogspot.com/2010/09/using-sphere-to-understand-light-on.html

• https://douglasflynt.blogspot.com/2012/06/painting-naturalistic-skin-colors-part.html

• https://douglasflynt.blogspot.com/2014/05/cheating-on-my-cadmiums-why-i-replaced.html

• Some colour-related highlights from the blog of outstanding painter and teacher Douglas Flynt.

Colour Constructor (Murry Lancashire)

• https://gumroad.com/l/ColorConstructor

• http://www.colourconstructor.com/

• Design the colours and values for an image according to a primary and an ambient light source and local colour. Windows and Mac.

Birren, Faber, Color perception in art (1976)*

• https://archive.org/details/colorperceptioni0000birr 

• Exceptionally prolific but very uneven author on colour who should be remembered by painters for his discussion of the use of colour relationships in creating various effects of luminosity and atmosphere, mainly here and in Creative Color (1987)*.

Colour in Architecture

Saturated space (Architectural Association School of Architecture).

• http://www.saturatedspace.org/

Study Group on Environmental Colour Design (ECD) of the International Colour Association (AIC)

• http://www.ad-chroma.com/index.php?article_id=15&clang=2 

Mahnke, Frank H., 1947-; Mahnke, Rudolf H., Color and light in man-made environments (1987)*

• https://archive.org/details/colorlightinmanm00mahn_0 

Colour in Photography and Cinema

(See also under Digital Colour Technology)

Hilty (Jonathan Tod Hilty)

• https://www.jonhilty.com/photography

• Blog on historical photography techniques including autochromes.

The CG Cinematography Book (Christophe Brejon)

• https://chrisbrejon.com/ 

• Very comprehensive, with detailed illustrated discussion of colour in cinema in the chapters on "Color Management" and "Color Theory".

Stanton:, Anthony, History of color in cinema (2018)

• http://www.iscc-archive.org/Munsell2018_Presentations/Stanton-Breakout-HistoryOfColorCinema.pdf 

Cinema palettes (@CINEMAPALETTES)

• https://twitter.com/CINEMAPALETTES

Color palette cinema

• https://www.instagram.com/colorpalette.cinema/?hl=en 

The colors of motion (Charlie Clark)

• https://thecolorsofmotion.com/ 

• "The Colors of Motion is an exploration of the use of color in movies. Each line represents the average color of a single frame". 

Movies in color (Roxy Radulescu)

• https://moviesincolor.com/ 

Wes Anderson palettes (Present & Correct )

• https://wesandersonpalettes.tumblr.com/ 

A short history of colour photography (National Science and Media Museum, UK)

• https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/history-colour-photography

Colour in Design

Color in design and applied art: a selective annotated bibliography (Marian-Ortolf Bagley and Barbara Ann Caron, 2011). 

• http://dha.design.umn.edu/research/coloranddesign/Table_of_Contents.html

• Bibliography of five hundred selected books on colour in design and art.

Visual perception and aesthetics (Steven Ståhlberg).

• http://www.androidblues.com/visualperception.html

Colour Scheme Generators

Your friendly guide to colors in data visualisation  (Lisa Charlotte Rost) 

• https://blog.datawrapper.de/colorguide/

• Great roundup of ways of creating colour palettes; source of several links below.

i want hue (Medialab)

• http://tools.medialab.sciences-po.fr/iwanthue/

• "Generate and refine palettes of optimally distinct colors". Separately choose a range of hue, chroma and lightness and then see the colours segregate out as you watch.

ColorBrewer 2.0  (ColorBrewer)

• https://colorbrewer2.org/ 

• Interactive "color advice for cartography"

Colorpicker for Data (Tristen Brown)

• http://tristen.ca/hcl-picker/ 

Data Color Picker (Erik Kennedy)

• https://learnui.design/tools/data-color-picker.html#palette 

• Tool for creating perceptually even scales between two colours

chroma.js palette helper (Gregor Aisch)

• https://vis4.net/palettes

• Explanation of this tool for creating multi-hued colour scales

Viz Palette (Elijah Meeks & Susie Lu) 

• https://projects.susielu.com/viz-palette 

• Palette tester

Color review (Anton Robsarve)

• https://color.review/ 

• Evaluates contrast between text and background

Adobe Color CC (formerly Kuler)

• https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/

• Conventional "colour harmony" rules applied to a custom hue circle that is based on a misguided transformation of the conventional digital hue circle to conform to the spacing and complementaries of the "traditional" RYB arrangement. Paletton below appears to use a similar hue circle.

Paletton (formerly Pixy's Color Scheme Designer)

• http://paletton.com

Color Calculator (Sessions College)

• http://www.sessions.edu/color-calculator/

HSL Color Schemer

• http://www.workwithcolor.com/hsl-color-schemer-01.htm

Color Palette Generator (DeGraeve.com)

• https://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/ 

• Generates colour palettes from an image

Color combinations and color schemes

• http://www.colorcombos.com/

• http://www.colourlovers.com/

Colormind

• http://colormind.io/

Mystic Symbolic (Nina Paley)

• https://www.mysticsymbolic.art/

The following sites were recently removed for failing to respond at the last time they were checked: 

Colormap tool (Benjamin Stauss, University of Konstanz)

• http://infovis.uni-konstanz.de/tools/colormap/index.html

• Interpolates RGB colours in RGB, XYZ, HSV and HSL colour spaces

Mudcube

• https://galacticmilk.com/sphere/#

Using color in information display graphics (NASA) 

• http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/ColorTool.php

Colorgorical (Connor Gramazio)

• http://vrl.cs.brown.edu/color 

Palette Creator (HCL Wizard)

• http://hclwizard.org:64230/hclwizard/

Note that the numerous online "colour harmony tools" based on either the standard RGB hue circle or the traditional RYB "colour wheel" are of questionable value, even assuming the validity of conventional rules of complementary, split-complementary, triadic etc. harmony. The RGB hue circle is very uneven perceptually and does not show accurate additive (visual) complementaries except on the red-cyan, green-magenta and yellow-blue axes. Hue circles based on the historical red-yellow-blue primaries are also distorted in terms of both perceptual uniformity and visual complementary relationships.. 

*Titles marked with an asterisk were published between twenty-five to one hundred years ago and are available to read online for an hour at a time or be borrowed (subject to a wait list) for 14 days, but can not be downloaded.