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THE STUDY OF COLOUR ALTHOUGH Colour has for ages possessed a great attraction for mankind, and although the love of Colour is still most marked among children, it is remarkable that so little should have been done to encourage the study of it. The student, indeed, finds his path beset with difficulties. By one school he is told to study Nature, by another to follow Tradition, while a third warns him to trust to his own instinct. Now, although there is a certain foundation of truth for each type of advice, it is still true that a student may be greatly helped by being set upon a path which bears the marks of both Nature and Tradition, yet in which no man can travel far unless he will also trust himself. A master of Colour, like a master of words, is born, not made, yet who would argue that a child should not be taught to speak ? Even so, it seems absurd not to teach a student the A B C of Colour, if we can but find what we should teach. The great difficulty is the first step. We take our colour-box and find in it a series of tints, all of which obviously bear some relation to one another, but the endeavour to discover that relation is commonly doomed to failure. Experiment with the colour-box will, by patience and method, teach us what a vast range of tints we can make by mixing our " paints/' but we must remember that, after all, " paint " is not " colour," and that while the mixing of paints means loss of light, the mingling of colours means a gain of light. Moreover, experience teaches that knowledge of the colour-box is not sufficient by itself as a basis whereon to found a theory of colour. We can easily demonstrate that the mixture of blue and yellow produces green, or that purple results from mixing crimson and blue,but although we can show how green and purple tints can be made, we do not show what relation green and purple bear to one another. One of the first—and also one of the greatest —difficulties which the student meets is that two tints which are quite pleasant when placed side by side in one order of strength become most unpleasant when that order of strength is reversed. Thus a full tint of red side by side with a deep purple will appear rich and good, but if the same red be placed by a light purple the result will be harsh and unpleasing. Many other pairs of tints may be tested together and found to yield the same result, so that at once it becomes evident that this question of relative strength must be seriously considered in ill cases of harmonious arrangement. Experience proves that without a knowledge of the effect of relative strength no satisfactory theory of colour can be put forward. This reason alone is enough to show the weakness of the old yellow, red, and blue theory, which takes no account of relative strengths. Continued on this page |