Colour and Vision Theory in Art and Design


Websites and blogs

The Dimensions of Colour (me): 
http://www.huevaluechroma.com

Handprint (Bruce MacEvoy): 
http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/wcolor.html

Rational Painting (forum)
http://rationalpainting.org/

Colour Tools for Painters (Paul Centore)
http://www.munsellcolourscienceforpainters.com/

Gurneyjourney (James Gurney)

ColorAcademy (Don Pavey and Roy Osborne).
http://www.coloracademy.co.uk/Online/index.html

Color in Design and Applied Art: A Selective Annotated Bibliography (Marian-Ortolf Bagley and Barbara Ann Caron, 2011). Five hundred selected books on colour
http://dha.design.umn.edu/research/coloranddesign/Table_of_Contents.html

ColourLex: Art and Science

Glossary of Colour Terms (ColorTec)

ColorBasics - Color Theory for the Layman

The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Sarah Lowengard)
http://www.gutenberg-e.org/lowengard/print.html

Visual Perception and Aesthetics (Steven Ståhlberg).
http://www.androidblues.com/visualperception.html

Color Vision and Art (Webexhibits).
http://webexhibits.org/colorart/

Color Printing in the Nineteenth Century.An Exhibition at the Hugh M. Morris Library University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware, August 27 - December 19, 1996.
http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/exhibits/color/

Digital Archive of Documents Related to Color in Textiles

The Morning after the Deluge (Alexandra Loske)
"A blog about colours, light and shade in art"

Saturated Space (Architectural Association School of Architecture).

Timeline of Historical Film Colors (Barbara Flueckiger)

Pixar in a Box - Color Science (Dominic Glynn)


Pigments and paints

The Color of Art: Pigments (David Myers)
http://www.artiscreation.com/Color_index_names.html

Paintmaking.com (Tony Johansen): Large site on pigments and their history.
http://www.paintmaking.com/pigments.htm

 Handprint guide to watercolor pigments (Bruce MacEvoy)
http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/waterfs.html

Artists' Palettes and Colour Mixing (ColorAcademy)
http://www.coloracademy.co.uk/ColorAcademy%202006/palettesandmixing/homepage/home.htm

Pigments Through the Ages (Webexhibits).
http://webexhibits.org/pigments/


Adobe Photoshop

 Applied Color Theory in Photoshop (Dan Margulis) 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/colortheory/

The first ten years of Photoshop (Jeff Schewe)
http://www.schewephoto.com/pei/pshistory.pdf


Paint mixing programs

Colour Mixing Tools (Zsolt Kovacs-Vajna)
Suite of free programs comprising:
Color2Drop (a program to convert RGB, Lab or Munsell HVC color coordinates into paint mixing recipes)
Drop2Color (a program to visualize the color of mixed paint recipes)
RS2Color (a program to visualize the color of reflectance spectra)
http://zsolt-kovacs.unibs.it/colormixingtools

Paint Tutor (Jean Pretorius)

Sensual Logic PaintMaker (Christian Skeel)

True Color - Color Mixing Assistant
By Snickerdoodle Software, LL

Oil Painting Assistant (Mike Rozak)
Very early oil painting app.

Colour scheme generators

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

i want hue (Medialab)
"Colors for data scientists. Generate and refine palettes of optimally distinct colors"
http://tools.medialab.sciences-po.fr/iwanthue/

Colormap tool (Benjamin Stauss, University of Konstanz)
Interpolates RGB colours in RGB, XYZ, HSV and HSL colour spaces

HCL colorpicker
Interpolates RGB colours in Lab colour space

NASA color tool

http://redalt.com/ilyc (get colour scheme from a webpage)

Genopal
http://genopal.com/ (get colour scheme from a photo or by setting proximity to starting colour)

Note that there are many other "colour harmony tools" available as programs or online, but most of these are of extremely dubious value, being based either on the RGB hue circle, which is very uneven perceptually and does not show accurate additive (visual) complementaries except on the red-cyan, green-magenta and yellow-blue axes, or on misguided attempts to transform this hue circle to conform to the "traditional" colour wheel (e.g. Adobe ColorCC/Kuler).


Colour symbolism

This is Color (Nicole Cohen and Beth Novey).
http://apps.npr.org/lookatthis/posts/colors/

Color Symbolism Chart by Culture (Jennifer Kyrnin)
http://webdesign.about.com/od/color/a/bl_colorculture.htm

Color Communication & Symbolism. 
http://www.mariaclaudiacortes.com/colors/colors.swf   (animated/interactive)