2D Design (Art 107)

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Color

Color is a property of light. In the year 1666, the same year as the Great Fire in London and only a year after the Black Death swept through London, some 60 miles away in Cambridge, Sir Isaac Newton, passed a beam of light through a prism and observed the already well known phenomenon of light being refracted into the different bands of color in the spectrum. What Newton did, however, that was noteworthy was to then pass the colored bands of light through another prism to create a new beam of white light, thereby proving that color is a component of light.

Objects, or more properly the surface of objects, absorb and reflect light in varying degrees. Something we would say is white reflects almost all the light that falls on it and in an even distribution across the range of visible light. Some thing we would say is black absorbs almost all the light that falls on it, also in even proportions. Other objects appear to be “colored” because they reflect and absorb select and differing proportions of the visible light spectrum.

Visible Light represents a narrow band of the full range of electromagnetic energy that also includes radio waves, infrared and X-rays. Each of the colored components of white light represents different band or range of wavelengths or frequencies. Listed below are the ranges, in wavelengths, for the standard spectrum of colors; “nm” is an abbreviation for nanometer, which is 1-billionth of a meter. Note the difference in range from one color to another. Red spans 113 nm while yellow spans only 10 nm.