But in his diagram he identified seven colors we’ve come to know as ROYGBIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet). Newton observed that the hues gradate smoothly into each other. The result was a hue circle, better known as a color wheel. Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) proposed wrapping the spectral colors around a circle by merging the two ends, red and violet. Within that smooth spectrum, there’s no clear division between the colors. When white light is bent or refracted by a prism or a rainbow, it separates into a continuous gradation of colors. This may seem like boring review, but if you read all the posts this week, you may end up completely rethinking the color wheel-at least that’s what happened to me. The color wheel is our mental map of the color universe. That’s what I’d like to explore over the next seven posts. How we name and separate the colors on the color wheel is a subject with roots in physical science, visual perception, and artistic tradition.
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