Colour Basics and Fundamentals

Most people dont realise this, but colours affect our daily lives in more ways than we can truly comprehend. Every different hue, shade and tone holds the ability to play the most trivial and the most significant psychological tricks on us. Colours make us angry, they make us sad; they can trigger hunger or kill ones appetite. Colours convey messages: Black makes a statement or Paint the town red. They determine aesthetics and form the basis for multi-million dollar brand campaigns. Colours are, ultimately, the most definitive biological hoax there is. If you can read this, it means you have been blessed with a functional pair of eyes. And if you have been blessed with a functional pair of eyes, you can see colour. Literally everything around you is a colour of some sort. But how many times do you stop to ask Why? What is colour, exactly? The answer lies in the fundamentals of physics, which defines colour as the sensory perception triggered by the reception of light waves on the retina of the eye. In much the same way that we perceive sound with our ears, our eyes perceive colour. The difference being only the organ that does the perceiving, as well as the nature of what it perceives. A sound wave cannot be observed by the eye, and vice versa. Thus, colour is nothing more the brains interpretation of light. As for the science behind why we can see so many colours and colour shades, the answer is just a little more technical. Light consists of seven similar waves of varying wavelength. Depending on which of these waves the eye perceives, we see one of the following colours: Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green Yellow, Orange or Red; or blends thereof, which make up what we know as shades. When perceived as a whole, we see these waves as white, and black is simply the opposite, a complete absence of light. However, it is interesting to note that most people have never been exposed to complete blackness, at least not in the scientific sense of the word. The seven different wavelengths that exist between white and black, and the several combinations and permutations they generate collectively constitute the colour spectrum of human vision. If one had to ask how many colours exist in the world, the most appropriate answer would be infinity. Though psychophysicists have calculated that human civilization is capable of seeing up to 10 million different colours, the incalculable secondary factors that determine how we see colour (such as external lighting and our own personal sensitivity to light) make the math of colours virtually impossible. This brings us to colour palettes. A colour palette distils the infinite possibility of colour combinations down to a few select basic colours. Colour palettes are most often used today in computer assisted art. 8-bit palettes provided colour to the earliest computer graphics, as were found in games like Nintendos Mario series. Today, highly refined 48-bit palettes are capable of producing an exponentially more numerous variety of colour schemes. Keywords: Colours, Colour Paints, Colour Basics, Colour Fundamentals, Colour Palette, Colour Shades, Colour Combinations, Colour Schemes