There's an interesting aspect of colour that this article doesn't cover, which is the psychological primaries (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_color#Psychological_primaries" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_color#Psychological_pr...</a>).<p>The eye gets colour information from the three types of cone, but it then processes this information into three new dimensions. Black against white, red against green, yellow against blue. So from a psychological point of view there are four primary colours: RYGB.<p>These are arranged like the points on a compassb so it's impossible to experience a mix of red and green or yellow and blue, just like it's impossible to be both north and south.<p>I think this is why these colours tend to be used more often in logos and board game pieces. The brain views them as more simple, and the psychological secodary colours (orange, chartreuse, turquoise and purple) as more complex.
I find it really amazing how we went down the process of figuring out how color works -- Goethe's work in particular is really interesting because it is a very empirical approach based on the observation that afterimages exist.<p>The limitation in so many cases, and the reason why there's a constant crossover in this history between textiles dying, artists, and researchers, is that producing substances which represent a given color and have good light-fastness are hard to come by unless there's a strong commercial reason to explore the space.<p>At one point I was looking to see if I could buy paints for my kids to play with in the "true"-er primary colors, CMYK, and that led down a big rabbit hole (basic answer is "not easily", unfortunately) eventually leading me to [1] which is a fascinating look at our ability to span the gamut through some set of primaries.<p>From personal experience, I always find it amazing when I see a color magazine in the light and note that some parts are reflective and some are more matte; and that this is not a function of intent of any sort -- those are just the incidental properties of the physical pigments selected for their saturation/brightness/fastness primarily.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color13.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color13.html</a>
About 10 years ago, I had an idea about designing a lamp, using LEDs (I'm an electrician). So I wanted to learn which colours to blend in what proportion to achieve a pleasant colour temperature and good colour rendering. This idea led me down an UNBELIEVABLE rabbit hole of colour theory. This subject is maddeningly complex, and I feel like I still don't know anything at all.
I love this conference talk for introducing linear and perceptually uniform colorspaces:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU</a>
Back in the 80s/90s I spent time trying to standardize the \special commands used by TeX. I remember thinking color would be a simple thing and then discovering the whole rathole that's RGB vs CMY vs CMYK vs HSB. The problem of doing simple in-line graphics was another issue that raised its ugly head as I realized that I was facing essentially reinventing PostScript once you face the question of what happens at the corner of two lines. I don't think much if any of what I came with was ever implemented and the migration in the twenty-first century of TeX to pdftex then xetex and luatex made it all moot since there was no longer the plethora of dvi-to-printer drivers in the mix.
James Turrell's light sculptures are an exercise in color theory<p><a href="https://crystalbridges.org/blog/james-turrell-josef-albers-color-theory-work-skyspace/" rel="nofollow">https://crystalbridges.org/blog/james-turrell-josef-albers-c...</a>
I have experimented with synthesizing colour in the computer using a kind of binary DNA as a basis, which allowed me to mix colours (or more precisely their RGB components) in interesting ways [1]. I'm not sure it stands up to artistic or theoretical scrutiny, but it was fun and I saw some nice results. I should take some time and get a better understanding of colour theory, as per the article.<p>[1] <a href="http://robertallison.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://robertallison.co.uk/</a>