Colour Theory

Colour is incredibly important in the design industry and is very effective to an audience. Different colours can connote completely different messages and its the first thing a viewer will pick up, both consciously and subliminally. A simple colour can say a lot about a piece (e.g. it's core message/context/genre) without any other text or imagery. To understand colour we had to learn about mixing colours and the colour wheel. We did a short test where we discovered that there are lights; Cyan, Magenta and Yellow (which can be mixed to make other colours). These are the colours that should be used when painting. On a computer, it's different, as the colours used to make colours are Red, Green and Blue (or RGB). Both of these mixing techniques can be worked out using the Colour Wheel.

In our Interactive lesson with Steve we had the task to make our own colour wheel to help further our knowledge of colour. We had to make the colour wheel using our own photos, so in groups we went into Bath looking for colours. Most of the main colours on the very outside of the wheel were fairly easy to find around Bath, some could even be found inside College. Magenta and Purple proved fairly hard to find however. As we went on with our hour to gather as many colours as possible, I discovered how it was quite a painstaking task to find the lighter colours seen closer to the center of the wheel, however I managed to gather most of them.

Once our time was up we returned to class to arrange our photos into a colour wheel. I used Photoshop and the wheel pictured above as a template for mine. With the magic wand tool and many, many layers I made my colour wheel. The final product is pictured below: