Heavy and Weightless Colors

To paraphrase a classic riddle, which weighs more: a pound of yellow feathers or a pound of red lead? Color may be a weighty subject, but the spectrum can't be gaged in terms of tonnage. The Swiss painter Paul Klee observed that colour can be "neither weighed nor measured. Neither with scales nor with ruler can any difference be detected between two surfaces, one a pure yellow and the other a pure red, of similar area and similar brilliance. And yet, an essential difference remains, which we, in words, label yellow and red" (On Modern Art, 1948). Klee was right—even though colors don't technically have weight, they can appear quite heavy and substantial or extraordinarily light and vaporous.

ColourLover Steph6 attempted to bridge the gap between heavy and light colours. She coined a sandy colour "Heavy Light."

Other COLOURlovers have attempted to classify weightless colors and palettes:

On the opposite end of the scales, heavy colors and palettes include:

(Thanks to Paul Dean for his colorful research.)