A little basic colour theory

[Eric Hardy]

I find Brian's diagram interesting because it shows texture and appears to be photographed fabric. That was my difficulty with the Peter Piper's Palette Picker. Thinking garden is thinking hues, saturation and textures. I am gazing out of the window at a tall conifer in our garden with the sun shining on it. As Brian says it is all the same hue, green but with an infinite number of variations. It is terrific of Trevor to have started this thread and your contribution Brian has started me thinking more about it. I have usually relied on Anthea for advising on colour and she does have an instinct for it. What she does always seems to work for me. The garden seems to have it's colour seasons beginning with a generally white and yellow start to the year with a gradual change to white, pink, blue and mauve followed by more mellow colours in the autumn. When I was an architectural student in the 1940's I was a bit nervous of colour. We did elaborate presentation drawings on stretched Whatman paper using Chinese stick ink which we ground into a palette with water. I eventually found a formula which was very safe and I tended to stay with it, it was basically Pain's Grey, Cobalt Blue and white in different intensities.  Not very adventurous I will agree but it seemed to work.

[Trevor Ellis]

Having said all that, nature breaks all the rules and gets away with it.

Great extension of the topic there Brian. Your observation above, it's certainly true. It's often when a problem occurs, for instance  if someone is trying to achieve a feeling of greater or shorter distance that is denied by an intensity or area of colour and they aren't aware of what's actually happening in frustrating their efforts/requirements. Maybe the postings and replies will just raise awareness of a few aspects of the subject in a helpful way. Of course relative to the subject as well is the condition of colour deficiency but I don't know of an easy way of determining if anyone is deficient or not other than the Ishihara colour test and I should think that few people have easy access to a copy. Maybe they're available through libraries - I don't know. Being a predominantly male issue anyway, maybe it's easier for men to check with women that what they think is red is red etc!

PS
Have just checked on the net and there is an online version of the Ishihara test for colour blindness at http://colorvisiontesting.com/ishihara.htm. There are some other sites dealing with it too. http://www.robinsonscamera.com/color_blindness_test.htm is one of them.