A short-form series on historical and contemporary color wheels, and why they were built. Each episode discusses what problem a color wheel (or wheels) tried to solve, who made it, and what it gets right or wrong. We end up covering a lot of color theory ground in the process! New episodes every Wednesday.
Curated by: Color Nerd (24 videos)
August Kirschmann, Arthur Pope, Hans Podestà, Manfred Adam. Each is a color theorist who put their own slant on the color wheel. A viewer named Felicity asked whether anyone's ever built a double-cone color model that's a bit "skew whiff:" slanted so the purest yellow sits up near white, and the purest violet drops down toward black. Turns out yes, over and over, for more than a century. In this video, we go from Kirschmann's 1896 diagram, through Arthur Pope's theory of "tone relations," to a color scientist working behind the Iron Curtain on East Germany's official color standard... and finally to a build-it-yourself model invented by color theory historian Andreas Schwarz. This is episode 18 of Color Wheel Wednesday. New episode every week! Keep the questions coming :) Download and build your own Kirschmann Color Solid: https://bit.ly/44gHWbE Bibliography: Primary Sources: Kirschmann, August. "Color-Saturation and Its Quantitative Relations." The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 7, No. 3 (April 1896), pp. 386–404. Hellpach, Willy. Sinne und Seele: Zwölf Gänge in ihrem Grenzdickicht. Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1946 (see esp. pp. 132–133 for the color-solid passage). Pope, Arthur. Tone Relations in Painting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922. Podestà, Hans. Physiologische Farbenlehre. With a foreword by Wilhelm Ostwald. Leipzig: Unesma, 1922. ——. "Beiträge zur Systematik der Farbempfindungen." 1930. Adam, Manfred. TGL 21 579 – Farbenkarte, Grundsystem. Sonderdruck für die Internationale Farbtagung ("Interfarbe") 1966, Dresden. Leipzig: Buchhaus Leipzig, 1965. Schwarz, Andreas. Kleines Farbenpraktikum: 45 Farbmuster, Übungsanleitung und Farbkörpermodell als Bastelbogen. Braunschweig: Westermann/Schroedel, 2014. See also his website: "A Didactic Color Order System" https://dr-andreas-schwarz.de/en/didactic-color-order-system.html General history: Kuehni, R. G., and Schwarz, A. Color Ordered: A Survey of Color Order Systems from Antiquity to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. #colortheory #colorwheel #arthistory