The first color wheel (a.k.a. color circle) has been traced back to Sir Isaac Newton, who in 1706 arranged red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet into a natural progression on a rotating disk. As the disk spins, the colors blur together so rapidly that the human eye sees white. Artists have been experimenting with colour wheels ever since, finding inspiration in everything from cocktail umbrellas, river rocks, autumn leaves, pencil shavings, to juggling.

The Happy Hour color wheel consists of exotic cocktail umbrellas. It was created by Bright Lights Little City:

The Rocks color wheel is a collection of stones from Salmon River, Idaho. It was assembled by Purl Bee:

This Yarn Skeinlet color wheel features dyes made of cochineal (ground up cactus-eating scale insects), osage orange, chamomile, indigo and logwood. It was created by Sarah of the Blue Garter blog:

The Circle of Life color wheel was created by Thalandor as a tribute to the artist Mother Nature:

This Kusudama (Medicine Ball) color wheel was created by Origami artist Vanessa Gould:

The Pencil Shavings color wheel was photographed by Myruby:

And a full pencil color wheel was taken by ERK_

This Garden Blossom color wheel is the work of Tiny Haus:

The Juggler color wheel was painted by Kenneth Callicutt:

The Chalk color wheel was photographed near Parc De La Villette, Paris, by Jacobz:

Another chalk color wheel was spotted in Paris by seanhabig:

Cover by Claire L. Evans.

About the Guest Author, Craig Conley
Website: http://www.OneLetterWords.com
Craig is an independent scholar and author of dozens of strange and unusual books, including a unicorn field guide and a dictionary of magic words. He also loves color: Prof. Oddfellow

Chronic pain has its own devastating side effects, even in the absence of medication. Sufferers of migraine headaches sometimes report a phenomenon that amounts to color-blindness. Jeff of the Omegaword blog explains that chronic pain has a peculiar way of removing color from the world. He poetically describes his experience of a reality in which all color has been erased by bursts of red:

"Red has never been my favorite color. Bolts of hot pain sear the world, leaving me colorblind but for the shards that stay behind — jagged red reminders of pain past, and pain yet to come. Through the window, beyond the mute interplay of light and shadow on a white kitchen wall, bare branches against a pale sky remind me that it's all in my head. What color are light waves, anyway?"

A new study of synesthesia confirms Jeff's observation that the colour of the world is all in one's head. Cretian van Campen, author of The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science (2007), explains: "A mysterious aspect of color is that it is created in the brain and seen to exist in the physical environment. But the physical environment contains only light waves and is in fact colorless. The colors are inside our brains, not outside."

Color palettes sometimes testify to hues that have been displaced or erased by profound circumstances. For example, COLOURlover Codename Gimmick envisions the frosty onset of winter as a time when "frequencies from red to yellow have been silenced." His "Frost-Over" palette celebrates red and yellow through their striking absence.

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:

Our friends over at Coudal Partners pointed us to a Live Layer Tennis match in progress... This one is not only colorful and fun.. the creative forces are battling with flash. All matches take place on Fridays, live at 2pm Chicago time or GMT-6, Pop over and take a peek.

Welcome to Layer Tennis’ first foray into the fourth dimension.

Considering the constraints of most modern browsers, we had to skip the third dimension (depth), so the fourth will have to do. Time has always been an essential element of the game, the competitors (and commentators) face a cruel 15-minute deadline, and — hear me when I say — those seconds tick away much faster at LT HQ than they do in your office, as you kill the waning hours of your work week.

This week, however, temporal space will actually tear through our 900x280-pixel battlefield, as renowned illustrators Trevor Van Meter and James Hutchinson face off in Adobe Flash. I pity their poor souls; if designing/illustrating/typesetting a volley isn't enough to do in a quarter-hour, they must find time to animate the volley as well. While this added challenge is likely to simplify the actual graphic content of the match (fine by me, I'm a bit of a minimalist), we're likely to see some great storytelling, as both competitors excel in that area, and each has an arsenal of ready-made characters that would make old Walt D. blush. (As I write this, I'm getting word that James, at least, is creating a new set of characters just for the match).

Though printed in black and white, great literature is bursting with vibrant colour. In this rebus-style puzzle, color words and parts of words have been replaced with colored boxes. Try to guess the exact hue of each. Roll your mouse over the colored boxes to reveal the missing words. Click the colored boxes to learn more about each hue. Special thanks to Paul Dean for his colorful research.

by sigusr0

Our autumn walks were delightful . . . and the trees took a colouring which in richness, brilliance, and variety, exceeded all description. I think it is the maple, or sugar- tree, that first sprinkles the forest with rich crimson; the beech follows, with all its harmony of golden tints, from pale yellow up to brightest orange. The dog- wood gives almost the purple colour of the mulberry; the chestnut softens all with its frequent mass of delicate brown, and the sturdy oak carries its deep green into the very lap of winter.—Frances Trollope (1780–1863), describing the woods of Ohio in Domestic Manners of the Americans, quoted in The Virago Book of Women Travellers, edited by Mary Morris with Larry O’Connor, 1994.

by DScott28604

There is little that needs to be said about colour. Employ all the colours on your palette — but if you should undertake to paint Berlin, be sure simply to use black and white, just a little ochre and ultramarine, and plenty of deep brown.”—Ludwig Meidner, Instructions for Painting Pictures of the Metropolis, 1914.

by tcissell01

And the two men laughed in each other’s sea- green, land- gray eyes.—Carl Sandburg, The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, 1970.

by 09traveler

With red and green I have tried to render the terrible passions of humanity. The room is blood red and mat yellow, a green billiard table in the middle, four lemon- yellow lamps with an orange and green glow. Everywhere it is a clash and contrast of the most disparate greens and reds. . . . For instance, the blood- red and the yellow- green of the billiard table contrast with the tiny bit of soft Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a pink bouquet.—Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), from a letter to his brother Theo; 8 September 1888. Reprinted in Art in Theory, 1815–1900, edited by Charles Harrison, 1998. quote>About the Guest Author, Craig ConleyWebsite: http://www.OneLetterWords.comCraig is an independent scholar and author of dozens of strange and unusual books, including a unicorn field guide and a dictionary of magic words. He also loves color: Prof. Oddfellow

Shrouded in mystery, ghostly apparitions materialize in many subtly haunting colors. Besides deathly white, the specrtral spectrum embraces ethereal violets, cadaverous yellows, twilit blues, midnight blacks, moonlit silvers, and near-transparent yet unmistakable hues spanning the entire night rainbow. The delicate, insubstantial hues of the ghostly realm can add an emotive dimension of wistfulness to any palette, Halloween-themed or otherwise.

Charley: What color? Nancy: Ghost color. Charley: Ghost color? Oh, ghost color! —John Cecil Holm, Gramercy Ghost (1951)

Strange white lustres and shadowy blacks are integral to the philosophy of art teacher John Ruskin. He explains: "When white is well managed, it ought to be strangely delicious,—tender as well as bright,—like inlaid mother of pearl, or white roses washed in milk. The eye ought to seek it for rest, brilliant though it may be; and to feel it as a space of strange, heavely paleness in the midst of the flushing of the colours. This effect you can only reach by general depth of middle tint, by absolutely refusing to allow any white to exist except where you need it, and by keeping the white itself subdued by grey, except at a few points of chief lustre.

I can't tell you the number of quizzes I've taken over the years trying to get an outside opinion about what's going on inside my head, but the ones I've found most interesting are those that ask questions of the senses -- other than sight -- to find your "inner" colour. No matter where you go, however, the underlying theme with all of these quizzes suggests colour in personality, or personality in colour.

By age five, almost all of us have a favorite colour. Associating ourselves with that colour, surrounding ourselves with it, and forsaking all others (at some point) is common place. But what if your favorite colour doesn't meet your inspirational needs? What if your energetic orange room doesn't let you relax? What if your deep blue room doesn't energize you? What if you need a different set of eyes to see what's missing? Looking to expand on the colors you already know any love? Here are some places you can go to find out just what to do.

The Voice of Color

Paint is the cheapest and most dynamic way to change a room. While accuracy is always called into question, what interests me most about this room colour test is its approach. Found here on our very own forum, Pittsburgh Paints brings their answer to the typical, over-simplifying colour-personality quiz by asking about what tastes, smells, textures, and principles you hold in the highest. With Pittsburgh Paints, it's all about you and your radically subjective world.

What do you get when Dr. Woohoo mashes up Adobe Illustrator CS3, Flickr and In The Mod: Color Analytics? A free swf Panel that runs inside AI CS3 that allows you to search Flickr & In The Mod, view the colors from each image or painting you select and then save them directly to the Swatches Panel in AI.
 

Adobe Illustrator CS3 + Flickr + In The Mod mash-up from dr woohoo.

Inspiration
The inspiration for the Flickr integration comes from a variety of sources – watching what Mario and Marcos did with Kelvin’s Flashr; looking at the photographs of the Ronin, Annie Liebowitz and Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir; and of course the colors we see all around us – in the orchids and the sunsets – whose combinations are simply perfect.

Blend, Gradient, Steps... whatever you call them, they're fun to make and to look at. I tried to organize them as best possible, but it honestly is difficult to categorize these things. First we have blends where all the colors are in pretty much the same hue. Then blends to black or gray. Analogous blends are of colors that are near each other on the color wheel and I threw the rest in complementary blends as they, for the most part have colors across the color wheel from each other.

Monochromatic Blends

Though printed in black and white, great literature is bursting with vibrant colour.  In this rebus-style puzzle, color words and parts of words have been replaced with colored boxes.  Try to guess the exact hue of each.  Roll your mouse over the colored boxes to reveal the missing words.  Click the colored boxes to learn more about each hue.  Special thanks to Paul Dean for his colorful research.

by gierszewski

Moldorf is word drunk. He has no veins or blood vessels, no heart or kidneys. He is a portable trunk filled with innumerable drawers and in the drawers are labels written out in white ink, brown ink, red ink, blue ink, vermilion, saffron, mauve, sienna, apricot, turquoise, onyx, Anjou, herring, Corona, verdigris, gorgonzola. . . .
—Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 1961.