A short-form series on the color wheels you've never heard of, and why they were built. Each episode covers one wheel: what problem it was solving, who made it, and what it gets right or wrong. New episodes every Wednesday.
Curated by: Color Nerd (18 videos)
The Munsell System is a rich and complex color order and notation system. Used as a standard in the US Government, used by artists to organize and control their palettes, and even used as the basis for color harmony guidebooks in Japan. But hey - this is Color Wheel Wednesday, so we'll mainly obsess here over the distinguishing feature of the Munsell color wheel - the fact that it has not 3, not 4, not 6 primary colors - but 5 principal hues. Why? The Munsell system doesn't necessarily care about additive or subtractive primaries. Instead, it's built around perceptually even steps between hues. Turns out Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Purple are equally distant from each other. (But orange is more of a half step.) in this episode I'll show you a few different appearances of Munsell-based hue circles from very different sources. plus a cool Irish color wheel of 5 hues and their complements that actually predates Munsell's first book by two years! By the way - I usually script out these episodes, and plan and structure what I'm going to say pretty carefully. This one was pretty off the cuff, so sorry if it's a bit rambly. this is episode 10 of Color Wheel Wednesday. Thanks for watching! Bibliography * Munsell, A. H. (1994). The Munsell Student Color Set (New ed.). Fairchild Books. * Gove, P. B. (Ed.). (1961). Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged. G. & C. Merriam Co. (Featuring the color plate prepared by Dorothy Nickerson). * Andrews, E. C. (1911). Color and Its Application to Printing. The Inland Printer Company. * Kobayashi, S. (1991). A Book of Colors. Kodansha International. * Burridge, R. Bob Burridge’s Goof-Proof Color Wheel. * American Society of Photogrammetry. (1968). Manual of Color Aerial Photography. * Ward, J. (1903). Color Harmony and Contrast: For the Use of Art Students, Designers, and Decorators. Chapman and Hall. #colorwheel #colortheory #arthistory