Colour wheel - build it yourself!
So, why do you want to make a colour-wheel, how does it work, and how can you make one out of lego yourself?
Personally I’ve had a too strong tendency to consider colours as a linear scale, usually from red to purple (which may be because I’ve gotten used to stacking bricks).
Although rainbow-scales are pretty to look at and good for analogous colourschemes made out of bright colours (like yellow-orange-red), they won’t help you if you wish to work with the much more effectful contrasting colourschemes (or understanding more complex colours such as tan: yellow, orange, and a pinch of blue or dark red: red with pinches of yellow and blue).
Picture time! Here’s the colour-wheel I made just after returning home for the weekend:
Contrasting colours are the ones sitting opposite eachother, like red/green, yellow/orange etc. An interesting fact is that if you mix up all primary colours you’ll get brownish colours - if it’s possible to consider a colourscheme as a “unified” colour, this may explain why “rainbow-warrior”-schemes are generally frowned upon - because it ends up messy or muddy.
The colour-wheel might help you create the much talked about 3-colour-scheme, if you consider each of the primary colours as primary, secondary and accent (I haven’t actually tested this yet, but I’m fairly sure it should work pretty well).
Enough talk for today, here’s the reverse of my colour-wheel so you can build one yourself:
Ah well, a little more ;) - tertiary colours are named after the primary colour and secondary colour next to it - ie. yellow-orange, for instance, is the one between yellow and orange.
I’ve used the following lego-colours for tertiary colours (counter clockwise): acid green (yellow-green), teal (blue-green), royal blue (blue-purple), light purple (red-purple) and earth orange (red-orange), and light orange (yellow-orange).
I’m definitly not satisfied with the royal blue (colour seem ok, but it’s too light) and earth orange (too muddy: must have some blue in there) - If you have any better suggestions, I’d love to see a picture.
Tags: Colour, colour wheel
July 22nd, 2008 at 10:19 pm
If you take a more scientific rather than artistic approach to color theory,
you’ll note that red, yellow, and blue aren’t a very good choice of primary
colors. Color exists as light of a specific wavelength. Spectral colors are
just one wavelength, while most colors we see are a combination of wavelengths
in different intensities. Fortunately, there are many different combinations
that yield the same signal when processed by the sensors in our eyes. This lets
us trick our eyes into reproducing colors by just mixing three or so different
colors in different quantities. We call these primary colors.
Blue, red, and yellow, blue sort of work, but like you said, they get kind of muddy
brown when mixed. We can do a little bit better by using cyan, magenta, and
yellow like your printer. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subtractive_color)
If we’re adding light together, then red, green, blue does pretty well. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additive_color) The specific choice of wavelength
for red, green, and blue determines the color range (gamut) you can display,
which is why the same image displayed on different monitors look slightly
different.
None of these can replicate true spectral colors, they’re just approximations.
For more, you might want to explore the color theory articles on Wikipedia or
pick up a computer graphics textbook.
July 23rd, 2008 at 6:22 pm
While you’re perfectly right that CMYK-colours are the best choice if you want to mix colours, which isn’t the case when it comes to lego (unless you grind some of you bricks to powder in order to tone other parts).
The available colour-palette in Lego is excactly the subject for the following blogpost (which would have fitted in really well before this one): Most of us have red, blue and yellow in over-abundance - while Cyan and Magenta are extremely rare.
I naturally hope to use the knowledge I gain from this investigation outside Lego (webdesign, choosing clothes, and interiour design), the main reason for taking up the subject on this lego page is the hope that we can all learn to utilize our collections better, and create more interesting spaceships.
That said I really find the coloured glass-discs on the wikipedia article you linked to interesting - it does look like cyan and magenta would complement Lego Green and Blue better… so perhaps the scarce colours can play a minor role yet.